Necessity of Coordinating Nondestructive Examination Requirement for Nuclear Power Plant

This article covers the design management of nondestructive examination (NDE) requirements for nuclear power plants. In recent years, there are many problems related to NDE requirements during the construction of nuclear power plants in China. These problems usually occurred at different stages of the projects, or among the boundaries of different engineering disciplines, which are considered to be related to the incoordination of design management. Under some circumstances, NDE requirements may be repeated, missing or conflicted in different design documents, which leads to inconvenience, confusion and even misdirection to technicians, and increases the risk of omitted inspection and even leads to the occurrence of omitted inspection. Some of these problems have an adverse impact on the quality or progress of projects, and probably also pose potential risks to nuclear safety. In order to avoid these NDE problems that should not have occurred, the owners and designers of nuclear power plant need to pay close attention to promoting the coordination of NDE requirements. Suggestions are made from three aspects: (1) Coordinate the NDE requirements among different class structures, systems and components (SSCs). (2) Coordinate the NDE requirements at the phases of manufacturing, installation and preservice inspection. (3) Standardize the presentation mode of NDE requirements in design documents.