Management Strategies for Nuclear Power Plant Outages

More competitive energy markets have had significant implications for nuclear power plant (NPP) operations, including, among others, the need for more efficient use of resources and more effective management of plant activities such as on-line maintenance and outages. Outage management is a key factor for safe, reliable and economic NPP performance. It involves many aspects including: plant policy; coordination of available resources; nuclear safety; regulatory and technical requirements; and all activities before and during the outage. The IAEA has produced this report on NPP outage management strategies as both a summary and an update to a series of technical publications related to practices regarding outage management and cost effective maintenance. The aim of this report is to identify good practices in outage management: outage planning and preparation, outage execution and post-outage review. This report aims to communicate these practices in a way that can be used by operating organizations and regulatory bodies in Member States.