Evaluating commercial-grade replacement items

A nuclear power plant uses thousands of replacement items during its lifetime. When many suppliers abandoned their quality assurance programs during the plant construction slowdown of the early 1980s, an EPRI-sponsored utility group called NCIG developed guidelines to help utilities evaluate replacement items themselves. However, the need became clear for greater collaboration. Thus EPRI established the Joint Utility Task Group (JUTG) to pool utilities' resources and develop criteria for dedicating commercial-grade items for safety-related nuclear applications. So far, the JUTG has developed a generic evaluation process and completed technical evaluations of 56 replacement items. The resulting information is available in an on-line database through EPRINET