The US nuclear fleet is getting ready for a busy outage season this fall. Besides basic refueling outages, there are three steam generators and one reactor head replacement scheduled. The US nuclear power industry has a reputation for operational excellence in the nuclear world. The nuclear industry in this country has significantly improved safety and performance over the past few decades, increasing plant reliability and "substantially increasing electricity generation output without adding new capacity," according to a January 2009 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) white paper. EPRI found that in the last 20 years, performance improvements in the US nuclear fleet were equal to building 27 new 1,000 MW nuclear plants. Allowing enough time for planning and execution of an outage can be tricky, but benchmarking can be done on all kinds of tasks, such as how long it takes to put up scaffolding. One thing that could ease pressure on strained resources is adjusting outage start and stop dates.
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