Recently, it has become evident that additional industry action is warranted regarding the performance of buried piping systems within nuclear installations. One of the challenges of this application is to achieve large coverage while keeping the costs at a reasonable level. This can be achieved using guided wave (GW) monitoring. Guided wave testing has been successfully used in the petrochemical industry and has recently been applied to piping in nuclear systems for the monitoring of buried components. In this article, the capabilities and limitations of GW monitoring are highlighted, and some examples of GW monitoring are discussed.
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