Non-destructive examination of NPP primary circuit components and concrete infrastructure (WANDA)

Passive components in nuclear power plants (NPP)s are monitored through in-service inspections (ISI)s. These passive components consists for example primary cirquit piping, steam generator and safety related concrete infrastructure such as the concrete containment. ISIs are heavily related to monitoring the condition of aging NPPs. WANDA has addressed these issues by focusing on three important aspects of proactive ageing management: early detection of deterioration, monitoring of deterioration, and application of prognostics for the estimation of remaining service life. NDE is one of the recommended tools for the early detection of deterioration of NPP materials.
Work in WANDA was divided into two work packages, in work package one the focus was on early detection deterioration and inspection reliability. These contained research on investigating plausible ways to detect material deteroation and research on efficient ways to evaluate probability of detection curves for ISI. In work package two the focus was on concrete infrastructure. Mainly the goal was to bring concrete NDE research on a par with metal NDE, thus doing foundational work on first con-crete containtment mock-up for research purposes and constructing the mock-up itself.