DESIGN OF EPR CRDM HOUSING

The first French Evolutionary Pressurized Reactor (EPR) is being built on the site of LAMANVILLE. The French regulation of application imposes a rule to perform the Pre-Service Inspections on the components of the main primary system with qualified Non-Destructive systems. UT & ET inspection of CRDM Pressure Housing Welds enters this scope. Qualification of both techniques is in progress at the present time, in order to end before PSI. This paper aims at presenting the technical solutions adopted to perform the inspection of 4 welds located all along housing. The lower weld is being controlled from OD, with UT examination process and the 3 upper welds are being controlled with ET examination process from ID. Since there is no experience feedback of such examinations performed on current French PWR CRDM Pressure Housings, EDF has chosen to benefit from the technical experience of AREVA intelligeNDT, that had already performed ET examination on similar upper welds, on Konvoi units. Despite this experience, new technical solutions have had to be developed to perform the examination of the component, according to the specificities of FLA 3 EPR. AREVA Intercontrôle, for its part, is the supervisor of all qualification processes and the main interface with EDF, in order to ensure the respect of the specifications