An analysis of maintenance failures at a nuclear power plant

In this paper, a study of faults caused by maintenance activities is presented. The objective of the study was to draw conclusions on the unplanned effects of maintenance on nuclear power plant (NPP) safety and system availability. More than 4400 maintenance history reports from the years 1992–1994 of Olkiluoto BWR NPP were analysed together with the maintenance personnel. The human action induced faults were classified, e.g. according to their multiplicity and effects. This paper presents and discusses the results of a statistical analysis of the data. Instrumentation and electrical components appeared to be especially prone to human failures. Many human failures were found in safety related systems. Several failures also remained latent from outages to power operation. However, the safety significance of failures was generally small. Modifications were an important source of multiple human failures. Plant maintenance data is a good source of human reliability data and it should be used more in the future.