Studies at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, are being conducted to evaluate nondestructive examination (NDE) approaches for inspecting coarse-grained, austenitic stainless steel reactor components. The work provides information to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on the utility, effectiveness, limitations, and reliability of advanced...

The cost of damage to the non-structural systems in critical facilities like nuclear power plants and hospitals can exceed 80% of the total cost of damage during an earthquake. The failure of nonstructural components, especially, piping systems led to leakage of water and subsequent shut-down of hospitals immediately after the event. Consequently, the evaluation of performance of these types of...

[1] This paper presents, for the first time, evidence to show that Calluna species are one causative factor of piping in blanket peat catchments. Ground-penetrating radar survey on 960 plots illustrated that piping was prevalent throughout blanket peats. However, soil pipe occurrence was significantly higher where bare peat (149 pipes/km) or Calluna (87 pipes/km) were present compared to other ...

District cooling system (DCS) is a mass-scale production of chilled water generated at a central and remote chiller plant. Through an underground piping network, the chilled water is delivered to serve a group of consumer buildings in a district area. DCS can offer both economical and environmental benefits. Because of the substantial capital investment and running energy involved, an optimal d...

Risk-Informed In-Service Inspection (RI-ISI) aims at prioritizing the components for inspection within the permissible risk level thereby avoiding unnecessary inspections. The two main factors that go into the prioritization of components are failure frequency and the consequence of the failure of these components. The study has been focused on piping component as presented in this paper. Failu...