Enterprise Asset Management for Nuclear Plants

Nuclear plants operate within a challenging and changing energy market. In the UK, the government’s British Energy Security Strategy policy paper proposes a significant acceleration of nuclear energy, with up to 24GW of generation by 2050. This would represent up to around 25% of electricity demand¹. It is intended that Small Modular Reactors will form a key part of the nuclear generation capacity, which will introduce more operators to the nuclear generation market.

This means that existing power generation businesses may need to implement a range of new systems, and skill up their management teams, in order to handle the considerable additional complexities that nuclear power generation entails.

Management in the nuclear industry faces a constant dichotomy of maintaining a totally risk-free generation environment, while still achieving an optimum level of financial performance. This applies to both the construction phase, and during the operational lifetime of the plant.

IBM Maximo, the leading Enterprise Asset Management solution, has an industry add-on specifically for the nuclear industry, which includes several tools to make the balance between these competing requirements easier to achieve.

Nuclear power plants have a working life which exceeds any individual person in the company. The UK’s original AGR reactors are now approaching 70 years in service, and the new generation of PWR reactors are expected to operate for even longer, perhaps for 100 years.

The combination of the highly challenging technical environment, the exceptional public safety requirement, and the extreme longevity of the plants, make it absolutely essential that all assets within plants are maintained to the very highest levels. The IBM Maximo^® for Nuclear Power industry add-on has been designed to help management achieve this.

And maintenance processes can be strictly enforced, so that engineers must perform all actions in a precise order, and every action they take is logged in Maximo^®.

This provides a full digital audit trail, and new data can be combined with historical data, and sensor-based automatic anomaly detection to spot potential issues, and prevent them becoming problems.

Regulatory compliance

Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 52, and NIA 1965 in the UK, require “reliability assurance programs” (RAP) for nuclear safety–related equipment.

To satisfy this requirement, nuclear plants must essentially be able to answer the question: “What activities are being carried out to ensure all equipment is reliable?”

IBM Maximo^® for Nuclear Power can help you fulfil your regulatory requirements by enabling you to:

• Manage the equipment lifecycle, including purchasing, configuration, work management, and maintenance
• Tracking LCO actions
• Manage shift operations
• Generate duty station shift records using advanced capabilities
• Promote nuclear safety by using clearances, impact plans, permits, condition reports, and corrective actions
• Automate processes for condition reporting and service request management by configuring predefined workflow content that is based on the Standard Nuclear Performance Model.
• Configure predefined report content based on industry KPIs, to suit your needs

¹ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energy-security-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy