Operating plant scorecard: A statistical analysis of plant outage performance

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between outage maintenance practices and overall plant performance at domestic nuclear stations with Westinghouse nuclear steam supply systems. While the specific data in this paper reflect only the Westinghouse subset of US nuclear stations, the author feels that the conclusions reached may well be applicable to light water reactor (LWR) systems in general. The trend toward longer fuel cycles at domestic nuclear stations is inevitable from the standpoint of fuel economics and spent-fuel storage considerations. The challenge is to adjust not only maintenance practices but maintenance philosophy as well, so that longer cycle times are not achieved at the expense of unit availability