Page 44 - Nuclear Plant Journal Digital Edition: January - February 2013
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Buried
Pipe Tool
By Ed Cooper, GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy.
Ed Cooper
Ed Cooper is the Buried Pipe Integrity
Group Projects Manager for GE Hitachi
Nuclear Energy (GEH) working in the
Asset Management
Services Division of
GEH. He has spent
most of his career
interfacing directly
with utilities to
identify and provide
solutions to utility
issues. Mr. Cooper
has more than 29
years of experience
in the nuclear
industry.
Ed Cooper
graduated from
Michigan State
University in
1980 with a BS in
Electrical Engineering.
As the global commercial nuclear
reactor fleet ages, preventing the loss
of tritium and other radionuclides from
buried piping in both BWRs and PWRs
is a priority for licensees as well as
regulators. Licensees have committed to
inspect buried assets, assess conditions,
and take proactive steps to remediate
buried degraded piping before it begins to
leak, but until now there has been limited
technology for inspections of buried
assets.
GE
Hitachi
Nuclear
Energy
(GEH) and General
Electric’s Industrial
Solutions (GEIS)
have collaborated
to develop a pip-
ing inspection tool,
called Surveyor
©
,
to fill the technol-
ogy gap. Surveyor
©
was launched in
September 2012 to
offer this technol-
ogy solution to the
oil and gas industry
and shortly there-
after, GEH secured
the first nuclear industry customer in No-
vember 2012.
“Having the ability to leverage this
great tool from an existing GE business
was a major benefit for GE Hitachi to
better serve customers,” said Kevin
Walsh, SVP Nuclear Fuels and Services.
“We can offer this to both PWR and BWR
customers and we are taking advantage
of GE Industrial Solutions’ experience
to serve the industry. With Surveyor
©
technology, we can offer a proven and
effective solution to inspecting internal
pipes in nuclear plants.”
Prior to GE’s introduction of
Surveyor
©
, customers relied on inspection
technologies that required costly and
high risk excavations to inspect piping
from the outside diameter. Surveyor
©
is
a self-propelled solution that robotically
crawls the length of the pipe, gathering
wall thickness data from the pipe internal
diameter eliminating the need for
excavation. The tool is multi-directional,
requires only a single entry point into
the pipe and is capable of vertical travel.
Pipes that are filled with liquid, partially
filled with liquid or dry can be inspected.
Surveyor’s inspection data is used
to assess the integrity of the pipeline and
44
Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2013
Launching Surveyor
©
: Robotic Inspection Too
l
