Hi gnesslar,
I work for a Canadian nuclear power plant operator. Nuclear items are designed and fabricated to CSA N285.0 which adopts many sections of the ASME III code. The ASME III is a design code that tells you how to design, fabricate and inspect things, complete with required calculations and material strengths. It requires complete traceability of items from raw material to finished product to installation. The joke in nuclear is that the paper-work can cost more than the item!
ASME III NCA-4110 (b) requires a quality assurance program to meet the requirements of NQA-1 1989 edition with 1989, 1991 and 1992 addenda. You can buy old copies of the code from
www.ihs.com. I have a 1996 (outdated) checklist which might help you to decide how close your current program is to meeting ASME III requirements. The quality assurance is the REAL big cost of the program, not the code books.
Yes, the code books are expensive (they’re massive), BUT unlike ISO, you aren’t continually forced to buy the newest code. You pick a code revision "date" that works for you and your customers, and you use all the code for that date. Nuclear customers prefer to purchase items to the code-effective date of their station (i.e. older codes).
It’s not an easy field to jump into and understand. An introductory course from ASME
http://www.asme.org or ANRIC Enterprises
http://www.anric.com would be well worth the money to get a good over-view, ensure you don’t miss something and make a good business decision. Also recommended is a couple of hours browsing through a copy of the code at a nearby university library.
An interesting twist worth exploring is the Canadian regulations. An N stamp is NOT required. You must build to the ASME code and register the design with a province. In the case of Ontario that's the the TSSA
http://www.tssa.org/regulated/boilers/).
It’s true that the number of nuclear suppliers has declined since new plants are not being built. However operators of existing nuclear plants are willing to pay high prices to the dwindling number of suppliers for replacement items and parts that meet code requirements. Don’t shy away from the business because the apparent price of the product appears too high! From my perspective it’s frequently cheaper than designing a modification or shutting a nuclear station down.
