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Nuclear Power Plants

NDT plays an important role in ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants both in inspection during construction and whilst in-service. In many countries there is a renewed interest in nuclear power generation due to the long term availability of the resource and the CO2 free nature of power generation it provides, as well as comparatively lower costs. NDT is the basic technique for both detecting and sizing of large flaws and monitoring material degradation such as irradiation embrittlement, thermal ageing, fatigue, plastic deformation, residual and/or applied stress, stress corrosion cracking, creep, etc. Consequently, it is a fundamental element of NPP maintenance and its effectiveness influences the maintenance performance.

Using condition based maintenance, unnecessary costly maintenance and  possible associated maintenance error induced failures can be avoided. This often leads to the achievement of nearly all maintenance targets for safety, reliability and cost.

Generation IV reactors, which are now being developed, use new sodium-cooled fast reactor designs.  This type of reactor is already being built in India and poses many challenges for NDT and Condition Monitoring including under sodium viewing, in-service inspection (ISI) of austenitic and transition welds and tubing.

For high integrity manual weld inspections the Masterscan Series is recommended by leading energy companies.

With changing technologies and the increasing in defect visualisation phased array and TOFD is becoming more common place; see the Veo 16:64 .