With more than 11 km of pipes in a nuclear power plant, the least you could say is that part of some plants could look like your overnight tupper full of dry and sticky spaghetti.

With pipes come welds. In addition of ensuring the material used for your pipes can withstand decades of extremely aggressive conditions such as high pressure fluids, radiations or high deltas of temperature, you also need to be sure your welds can withstand all of that too.

Typically, the discovery of corrosion phenomena in some reactors is not good news for the industry. Even in the new build sector, faulty welds is possible. The construction and maintenance of nuclear reactors does require regular inspection of tens of thousands of welds and when things go wrong, the effect can be critical. For instance, recently, EDF had to repair 53 welds across the Flamanville EPR site at a cost of €1.5b.

For each weld, independent inspection must be carried out. Once the work is done, testing and assurance of weld quality is done by non-destructive testing. Unfortunalty, the tracking is still mostly paper based and can lead to frauds or simply mistakes. For each radiographic inspection, a film must be kept with an inspection report. Sometimes the film can be lost or worse, the radiographer can inspect another weld and swap the films. Moreover, the reasons for corrosion issues – one of potential problems with pipes and welds - are not often clear. Aging of the materials, technical problems, human error, faulty controls, fraud? Whatever the case, the question of nuclear safety being an essential obsession, a mean to control and ensure that there are no frauds in the process of inspecting a weld is now essential. How can we significantly improve the data integrity and quality assurance of nuclear welds, even years after ?