The advantages of reliability centered maintenance for standby safety systems

On standby safety systems, nuclear plants have to balance the requirements of demonstrating the reliability of each system, while maintaining the system and plant availability. With the goal of demonstrating statistical reliability, these systems have extensive testing programs, which often makes the system unavailable and this can impact plant capacity. The inputs to the process are often safety and regulatory related, resulting in programs that provide a high level of scrutiny on the systems being considered. In such cases, the value of the application of a maintenance optimization strategy, such as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), is questioned. Part of the question stems from the use of the word 'Reliability' in RCM. When RCM is applied to a system maintenance program driven by reliability requirements, there appears to be redundancy. A deeper look at the RCM process, however, shows that the RCM goal is to ensure that the system operates 'reliably' through the application of an integrated maintenance strategy. This is a subtle, but important distinction. Although the system reliability requirements are an important part of the strategy evaluation, RCM provides a broader context where testing is only one part of an overall strategy focused on ensuring that component function is maintained through a combination of monitoring technologies (including testing), predictive techniques, and intrusive maintenance strategies. Each strategy is targeted to identify known component degradation mechanisms. The conclusion is that a maintenance program driven by reliability requirements will tend to have testing defined at a frequency intended to support the needed statistics. The testing demonstrates that the desired function is available today. Maintenance driven by functional requirements and known failure causes, as developed through a maintenance optimization assessment, will have frequencies tied to industry experience with components and rely on a higher degree of predictive monitoring. The testing in this strategy is part of an effort to ensure that the desired function is not only available today, but will be available tomorrow as well. This paper considers the application of a streamlined form of RCM to the Emergency Core Cooling (ECC) and Standby Diesel Generator (SDG) Systems of a CANDU plant. Recently completed studies provide useful insight into the important value added of the systematic assessment approach (using RCM techniques) for these standby safety systems. In the case of RCM analysis performed on the Emergency Core Cooling (ECC) System of Point Lepreau Nuclear Power Generating Station (PLGS), it was found that 60% of the current maintenance tasks are testing (functional, stroke, logic, and annunciation tests). Similarly, the SDGs have 50% of the maintenance tasks associated with testing. The paper considers how the results of the RCM analysis demonstrate that the analysis can be used to assist in the optimization of the testing program (as dictated by reliability) while also taking better advantage of the testing through condition monitoring and predictive maintenance techniques. Further, the results illustrate the importance of identifying and linking the different plant activities within a well integrated plant culture. (author)