The effect of plant reliability improvement in the cost of generating electricity

The objective of this investigation is to study the economic benefits in operating a nuclear power plant, as a result of improving the availability of the secondary (steam) loop of the plant. A new method has been developed to obtain availability, frequency of failure, probability and frequency of operation, cycle time, and uptime for different capacity states of a parallel series system having components with failure and repair rates distributed exponentially in time. The method has been applied to different subsystems, systems, and the secondary loop of a plant as a whole. The effect of having spare parts for several components, as measured by savings in the generation of electricity, is also studied. The Kettelle algorithm was applied to determine optimal allocation of spare parts to achieve maximum availability or minimum cost of electricity, subject to a fixed spare parts budget. The savings per year for optimal spare parts allocation and different spare parts budgets were obtained. The results show that the utility will save its customers a large amount of money if spare parts are purchased, especially at the beginning of the plant operation, and are allocated judiciously.