Dedication
Commercial Grade Dedication (CGD) has become an essential process in the nuclear industry as operating plants seek replacement parts and equipment from manufacturers that no longer have, or may never have had, a nuclear quality assurance program. In fact, new construction may heavily rely on CGD as alternative to having numerous manufacturers put QA programs in place and likely drop them in the future.
CGD in a function of testing and statistics. In a nutshell, CGD starts with a sample lot of products and some statistically relevant sample of products is subjected to both destructive and nondestructive tests and inspections. If the samples pass the tests and inspections, the remainder of the sample lot is declared acceptable for use in safety-related applications. Smaller lot sizes typically do not allow defectives, but larger lot sizes sometimes do. The industry standard is to be 95 percent certain that 95 percent of the items in the lot are good.
Dedicating items such as fasteners is simple; there are no moving parts and the requirements are well documented in published specifications. Dedicating a molded-case breaker is not so simple. One of the most difficult parts of the CGD process is creating the dedication plan, which consists of determining the necessary tests and inspections, the acceptance criteria, and the number to be performed.
Because of our strong engineering focus, NLI quickly became the nuclear industry’s top provider of third-party dedication services. We remain the leading provider of CGD equipment even though our growth in other areas has made CGD a small part of our business.