The needs of the nuclear power generation industry for reliable inspection

In nuclear power plants, inspection plays an important role in ensuring that plant is free of significant defects, both pre-service and in-service. Highly reliable inspection is needed, with a high probability of detecting defects large enough to be of structural concern. There are two aspects to ensuring highly reliable inspection: adequate inspection capability, i.e. the inspection procedure and equipment should be designed so as to be intrinsically capable of achieving the desired inspection performance; and adequate reliability in practice, i.e. the inspection performance should not be unacceptably degraded on-site by human factors such as an incorrectly applied procedure or errors in interpreting the collected data. This presentation briefly describes the methods used in the author's company to ensure that its inspections have both the desired intrinsic capability and are sufficiently reliable in practice. The paper also outlines some areas in which further work from research groups would be helpful.