😂
When something critical breaks, you don't want to be ordering or searching for parts, power plant down time is expensive.
Once a nuke plant in licensed to load fuel and operate, the license holder has period of time to build a database of critical spare parts for safe and reliable operation. They also need to know the shelf life of those parts, purchase the parts and maintain them in a controlled warehouse.
As you can imagine, there are thousands of components in a power planet and many of them have several thousand internal parts. Some manufacturers supply lists of spare parts, some do not, in either case, there are thousand of manuals and drawing that need analysis. Identical/similar components, e.g., air operated valves of specific sizes can be analyzed as a group, but only if their function and criticality to operation is the same. It's a daunting and critical task, time constrained and under the critical eye of the NRC.
Oh, and meanwhile, manufactures sell off product lines, change their designs, their materials and decide to leave the nuclear business entirely. So it also include commercial dedication of standard parts for use in a nuclear plant.
The job was interesting technically and it exposed me to my first relational computer database, Data Ease. Probably long dead software by now, but good in the pre-Window days of DOS.
Gene363 wrote:
