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

Abstract

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.