Justification of the nuclear power plant safety and operating efficiency in selection of maintenance and repair parameters

Abstract

Nuclear power plants (NPP) are subject to stiff requirements as to the cost effectiveness of their operation. However, since the NPP operation may be associated with the occurrence of severe environmental, social, political, material and other consequences as the result of nuclear and radiological accidents at NPPs, ensuring the specified level of the NPP safety is an operational task of the utmost importance. The current practice of the NPP design and operation suggests that the objectives involved in improving the efficiency of operation and those of ensuring the NPP safety level required by federal standards and regulations (NP-001) are achieved in isolation: no issues of ensuring high efficiency of the NPP operation are taken into account when addressing the issues involved in ensuring the safety of the NPP and, vice versa, it is a priori assumed that the required level of safety is ensured at any time when high efficiency of operation is achieved. The reason for this is the absence of procedures that make it possible to assess, in an integrated manner, the interdependence of economic and technological factors. The paper describes some of the methods to raise the efficiency of the NPP operation by selecting the best possible NPP maintenance and repair (M&R) strategies leading to high utilization and capacity factor values. A distinctive feature of the proposed techniques is that the efficiency of the NPP operation is proposed to be improved while ensuring at the same time the required level of the NPP safety with any NPP configuration.