Power Plant Life Management Research Articles

Maintenance Optimization and Nuclear Power Plant Life Management—A Proposal for an Integrated Set of Maintenance Effectiveness Indicators

Economic deregulation of electricity markets in many countries has placed nuclear power plants (NPPs) in a new competitive environment where capital, operating, and maintenance costs must be minimized. Optimization of the maintenance strategy, enhancement of the maintenance efficiency, and monitoring of the performance are becoming the key attributes to ensure the survival of nuclear utilities in the energy market. The Institute for Energy and Transport (IET), one of the seven scientific Institutes of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), aDirectorate General of the European Commission (EC) recognized the need to collect relevant experience and suggests a consolidated system of maintenance performance indicators (MPIs) to measure the maintenance effectiveness. This paper highlights the latest improvements of the suggested system and discusses open issues that need to be addressed in further research activities for enhancing the maintenance effectiveness of NPPs.

OECD/NEA Activities to Support Long Term Operation

The Integrity and Aging of Components and Structures Working Group (IAGE) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)/Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) was established under the Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI) for three reasons: (i) to advance the current understanding of those aspects relevant to ensuring the integrity of structures, systems, and components ; (ii) to provide for guidance in choosing the optimal ways to handle challenges to the integrity of operating as well as new nuclear power plants, and (iii) to take an integrated approach to design, safety, and nuclear power plant life management. The group operates through annual plenary meetings and technical workshops and by issuing state-of-the-art reports and topical opinion papers. This paper details some recent IAGE activities and products, focusing on those dealing with the degradationmechanisms of metal and concrete components.

Management of remaining life of power plant components by means of intelligent software tools developed at Stuttgart

In last years a series of large intelligent information management and decision support systems (“intelligent software tools”) has been developed at the MPA Stuttgart (MPA - Staatliche Materialprüfungsanstalt - State Institute for Testing of Materials), Germany. The projects have been sponsored mainly by power plant industry (electric utility companies, usually) and by The Commission of the European Communities within its framework programs like BRITE and SPRINT. This paper highlights some of these projects and intelligent software tools developed within these projects for analysis and assessment of remaining life, damage evolution and similar issues relevant for the modern power plant life management. Tools developed in two large European projects (Sprint SP249 and BRITE BE5935), for component life assessment and inspection planning, respectively, will be presented more in detail. Tools developed in SP249 cover issues like large high temperature materials database, large hypertext documentation base, various methods for life prediction (e.g. the those based on German TRD standards, A-parameter analysis, oxide thickness measurements, hardness-based methods, etc.). Tools developed in BE5935 support planning of annual inspection in power plants. They suggest answers to questions like when to inspect, using which techniques, to what extent, etc. Practical examples given in the paper illustrate abilities, usability and applicability limits of these systems.