Safety Preventive Maintenance In Nuclear Power Plant

Safety analysis of a nuclear power plant for postulated initiating events (PIEs) is an essential part of the design process, both as a regulatory requirement and also to generate performance requirement of safety system. A wide variety of computer codes have been developed in-house at Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) for safety analysis of Indian Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs). The applications and validation of these codes are discussed in this article. In addition to the conventional ‘deterministic’ safety analysis approaches, probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) techniques are also being applied in Indian PHWRs to gain additional insights Passing of steam trap becomes a major concern for all power plants due to high-enthalpy energy loss as well as wastage of costly DM water. On the other hand, if steam trap does not do its intended function, then it may lead to the damage of turbine and pipelines. Unfortunately, most power plants do not have a proper condition monitoring or preventive maintenance programmed for steam trap to know its healthiness.