International Outage Coding System for Nuclear Power Plants

The experience obtained in each individual plant constitutes the most relevant source of information for improving its performance. However, experience of the level of the utility country- and worldwide is also extremely valuable, as there are limitations to what can be learned from in-house experience. Learning from the experience of others is difficult if the information is not harmonized. Therefore, such systems should be standardized and applicable to all types of reactors, satisfying the needs of the broad set of nuclear power plant operators worldwide and allowing experience to be shared internationally. To cope with the considerable amount of information gathered from nuclear power plants worldwide, it is necessary to codify the information facilitating the identification of causes of outages, systems or component failures. Therefore, the IAEA established a sponsored Coordinated Research Project (CRP) on the International Outage Coding System to develop a general, internationally applicable system of coding nuclear power plant outages, providing worldwide nuclear utilities with a standardized tool for reporting outage information. This publication summarizes the results of this CRP and provides information for transformation of the historical outage data into the new coding system, taking into consideration the existing systems for coding nuclear power plant events (WANO, IAEA-IRS and IAEA PRIS) but avoiding duplication of efforts.