Holmes's wonderful one-hoss shay in today's world

摘要

A 157-year-old idea by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. may have found its time-if we can muster the technology to make it happen. Holmes's idea had to do with product reliability and longevity. Our nuclear power plants are safe and reliable. We work hard to build and keep them that way. But our plants are complicated machines at best, with many interacting parts, all subject to wearing out, or even-heaven forbid-breaking. We monitor and inspect constantly and have periodic shutdowns for maintenance. Shutdowns require the plant to be out of service for a time. Nuclear News dedicates an annual issue to Maintenance and another to Outage Management. We have a whole industry devoted to providing services and new, spare, or replacement parts for nuclear plants.