Nuclear Operations Posted July 22, 2004 at 12:00 am

Janet, our resident nuclear instructor and intern coordinator, gathered all the Farley interns together for an afternoon class. We discussed how the systems we worked with could affect the reliability of the plant (i.e. causing trips). Not surprisingly, IT systems were least probable to impact critical plant operations. IT’s criticality lies much more with plant communications (LAN, phones, pagers, plant data monitoring, etc.). After class, I inquired about how the plant is operated around planned maintenance procedures. Sometimes a unit must be taken offline and sometimes a unit is ramped down rather than taken offline for subsystem maintenance. I learned that some systems can be safely removed from service below specific power levels (e.g. Pump X could be removed from service at 60% power). Other systems cannot be removed from service without taking the unit offline. The goal in nuclear is for 100% output all the time—other forms of generation typically adjust output for load—so reliability is taken very seriously.