I report to my new plant about the same time they start an outage. Should I be expecting things? Want to walk in with my eyes open is all. NLO trainee FWIW.
edit: I looked at the outage schedule for next year. couple questions
1) It looks like every plant works together in scheduling in tandem. Is this circumstantial or planned?
2) why are some outages many times longer then others? More maintenance obviously, but what? Do we have a "pms" schedule like the navy does? I.e. every ten years check certain pumps or whatever.
3) outages occur every 2-3 years?
You will first spend a few days doing your plant access training. However, since they are starting an outage, you will be doing it with a lot of bubbas. Because they are starting an outage, they probably won't pay much attention to you except to assign you some task that will probably be menial, but educational. You should be able to get out and see a lot of things when the plant is cold iron. I am just guessing, but this is what I have seen my last 2 plants do with new NLOs during an outage.
1) Outages are planned for spring and fall. I don't think plants work together, unless they are in a "fleet," like Exelon.
2) Like you said, depends on what is going on. Could be replacing major parts such as steam generators or condensers, which would make the outage many months long, or could be doing not much of anything which could make it <30 days. Yes, there are PMs just like the Navy. Some of them can't be done until the plant is shut down, and that usually involves some involved diesel work or ECCS system testing.
3) In my experience, BWRs are on 2 year cycles PWRs are on 1.5 year cycles, YMMV.