A study of online maintenance practices at US nuclear plants

Author

Lin, James C.

Author_Institution

ABS Consulting, Irvine, CA, USA

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

5

Abstract

This paper discusses the insights gained from a study of the online maintenance (OLM) practices at selected US nuclear power plants. OLM has been practiced extensively in the US to shift some of the outage work to be performed during power operations. By reducing the outage work scope and performing more OLM, nuclear power plants can significantly reduce generation loss resulting from planned maintenance during outage. This is becoming increasingly important in a deregulated, competitive market environment for electric power supply. The workweek concept and rolling schedule are some of the aspects of OLM that makes the performance of OLM easier to implement. The scope of OLM, however, has to be carefully reviewed to ensure that reliability improvements resulting from OLM are not offset by extended unavailability of the safety systems or other undue operational risks

Keywords

failure analysis; fission reactor safety; nuclear power stations; nuclear reactor maintenance; reliability; USA; availability; electric power supply; generation loss; nuclear power plants; online maintenance practices; operational risks; outage work; planned maintenance; safety systems; Job shop scheduling; Maintenance; Nuclear power generation; Performance evaluation; Power generation; Power supplies; Power system reliability; Safety; Surveillance; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2002. Proceedings. Annual

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA

ISSN

0149-144X

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7348-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RAMS.2002.981611

Filename

981611