I have often mentioned my concerns with how conscientious the nuclear industry has been and will be with respect to maintenance at nuclear power plants. The situation in the U.S. was so bad in the 1980s that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) decided that they had to take action. Sloppy maintenance was actually causing new problems and increasing the risks to public safety.
The NRC had regulations in place that required plant owners to find and fix safety problems at their facilities in a timely and efficient manner. NRC regulations mandated that nuclear plant owners file what are called Licensee Event Reports (LER) with respect to safety problems related to poor maintenance practices. The number of LERs being reported rose during the 1980s and the NRC decided that current regulations for safety maintenance at nuclear power plants was not sufficient.
The NRC went through a public rule making process to develop Section 50.65, “Requirements for Monitoring the Effectiveness of Maintenance at Nuclear Power Plants.” This is called the Maintenance Rule. This rule goes beyond regulations that apply to the specifics of maintenance. It requires plant owners to periodically review just how effective their maintenance policies are in practice to insure that safety equipment will function properly as intended.
In response to this new rule, the nuclear industry developed an industry standard for a process to monitor maintenance procedures to insure that they comply with the new NRC rule. This industry standard is called NEWMARC 83-01 which has been formally approved by the NRC. Nuclear plant owners have the option of developing their own procedures but then they would have to seek approval of the NRC.
The NRC won praise for going beyond the expected response to worsening maintenance problems which would have been to call out violations and violators and demand that they follow existing NRC regulations. Instead the NRC stepped back and took a broader view of their regulatory mandate.
The new Maintenance Rule has helped nuclear plant owners to better evaluate their maintenance programs and the effectiveness of their safety equipment. The new rule requires the plant owners to periodically check all their maintenance equipment as opposed to only attending to equipment that has been associated with a reported problem. This periodic checking helps locate possible problems before they become actual problems. Proactive procedures such as these lead to more effective and cheaper maintenance and enhance safety.
Serious nuclear plant accidents have resulted from the conjunction of three causal factors. First, there is some event that starts the causal chain such as an earthquake, flood or fire. Then there is some design deficiency that prevents the problem from being dealt with by normal procedures and equipment. And finally, there is the human factor that may involve incompetence in the control room or may include the failure of a maintenance worker or procedure that should have prevent the accident from becoming catastrophic. The new rule from the NRC is intended to mitigate or remove entirely the second and third factors from the chain and to prevent accidents from becoming disasters.
