Long-idled Fort Calhoun nuclear plant gets green light to restart
Source: Omaha World Herald
By Cody Winchester
Federal regulators have given the Omaha Public Power District approval to restart the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station, which has been idle for nearly three years.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission “has concluded that the plant, people, and processes are ready to support the safe restart of the Fort Calhoun Station,” regional administrator Marc Dapas said Tuesday in a letter to the utility.
The district began the process of restarting the plant Tuesday. It will take five or six days to attain full power, spokesman Jeff Hanson said.
Fort Calhoun, about 20 miles north of downtown Omaha, has been offline since April 2011, when it was taken down for scheduled refueling. It was kept in a cold shutdown as floods overtopped the banks of the Missouri River, then placed under federal control after an electrical fire broke out and a number of safety violations were discovered.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.omaha.com/article/20131217/NEWS/131218891/1685#long-idled-fort-calhoun-nuclear-plant-gets-green-light-to-restart
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The Bathtub Curve and Product Failure Behavior
Part One - The Bathtub Curve, Infant Mortality and Burn-in
by Dennis J. Wilkins
Retired Hewlett-Packard Senior Reliability Specialist, currently a ReliaSoft Reliability Field Consultant
This paper is adapted with permission from work done while at Hewlett-Packard.
Reliability specialists often describe the lifetime of a population of products using a graphical representation called the bathtub curve. The bathtub curve consists of three periods: an infant mortality period with a decreasing failure rate followed by a normal life period (also known as "useful life"
with a low, relatively constant failure rate and concluding with a wear-out period that exhibits an increasing failure rate. This article provides an overview of how infant mortality, normal life failures and wear-out modes combine to create the overall product failure distributions. It describes methods to reduce failures at each stage of product life and shows how burn-in, when appropriate, can significantly reduce operational failure rate by screening out infant mortality failures. The material will be presented in two parts. Part One (presented in this issue) introduces the bathtub curve and covers infant mortality and burn-in. Part Two (presented in next month's HotWire) will address the remaining two periods of the bathtub curve: normal life failures and end of life wear-out....
http://www.weibull.com/hotwire/issue21/hottopics21.htm
