A regulatory tool for the assessment of maintenance program improvements

The authors review the basis for the development by the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) of a process to systematically assess the maintenance programs at Swedish nuclear power plants. After a description of the SKI's regulatory role, they identify the characteristics of an effective maintenance program, and the five resource functions of maintenance programs (people, material, tool, information, coordination). Then, after having outlined the importance of setting improvement goals and defined maintenance program acceptance criteria, they examine how the regulatory assessment will be used by the inspectors to evaluate activities such as the maintenance outage at nuclear power plants