[blattimwind]

Actually for power plants it isn't quite so simple. Because turbines and turbogenerators at nominal speed are quite close to the limit of what the material can support, they have multiple independent fail-safes. For example, if you tried to spin a turbine above safe speed, quick acting valves redirect the steam elsewhere in a fraction of a second.

However, there are absolutely things you could do in a power plant that greatly accelerate wear. It might be possible to accelerate wear enough to achieve failure of some parts before the next maintenance happens.

"Just shutting a plant off" on the other hand is not too difficult; for most plants and upstream systems "off" is the safe state, so all systems are designed to fail into that state, if they really have to.