Build-to-Replace Strategy to Reduce Operations and Maintenance Costs for Advanced Reactors

This paper targets the reduction of fixed operations and maintenance (O&M) costs for advanced reactor (AR) designs. The ability to achieve such reduction will be severely constrained if the assumptions that underly O&M approaches and practices are not questioned and reexamined, especially in the present day, when changes can be implemented both effectively and efficiently. Reducing AR O&M costs necessitates a paradigm shift that is unrealizable through incremental, technology-focused approaches alone.

The present work addresses this challenge by evaluating the impact of moving to shorter design lives for major structures, systems, and components (SSCs), as well as to shorter, more predictable refurbishment cycles, as modeled by the commercial airline industry. This is termed the build-to-replace approach. The present paper briefly overviews this new perspective on AR O&M, and provides a set of multi-objective optimization-based analytical tools to identify the benefits of this type of approach. As a direct example, we analyze a specific build-to-replace scenario by identifying and evaluating cases involving reduced SSC lifetimes and associated replacement/refurbishment schedules, thus enabling an evaluation of the impacts on O&M costs and other lifecycle elements, such as SSC reliability.