Summary
Structural Integrity Associates (SIA) has been devoted to nuclear since 1983, and one question ties the work together: what the water does to the metal, and what the metal does back. SIA’s Nuclear Chemistry and Materials practice sits there, pairing chemical engineering with the metallurgical and fracture mechanics expertise nuclear plant owners depend on. One team follows a problem from condition assessment through monitoring, remaining life analysis, repair, and risk management.
Chemistry work starts with a question about cost or margin — why a resin bed is exhausting early, whether reactor water cleanup flow can be raised, what a shutdown degas strategy costs on critical path. SIA answers with plant-specific modeling rather than rules of thumb: hydraulic and CFD studies of flow distribution, ion exchange models for deep bed and filter demineralizers, BWRVIA radiolysis and ECP calculations, heat exchanger performance evaluation, and radwaste process optimization. The result: BWR and PWR chemistry optimization grounded in a station’s own data — resin, cleanup, and layup strategies that lower cost without trading away chemistry performance.
The materials half takes on what chemistry cannot prevent outright. Stress corrosion cracking, flow-driven wall thinning, thermal fatigue, and irradiation embrittlement are evaluated against ASME Code criteria and NRC expectations, with hydrogen water chemistry, noble metal, and zinc injection as mitigation and weld overlay as repair. Fatigue monitoring, pressure-temperature limit curves, buried piping management, and NEI 03-08 support carry those components through license renewal. When something does fail, SIA’s metallurgical laboratory in Austin, Texas establishes why, backed by its nondestructive examination and advanced engineering groups.
Analysis matters only if a plant can act on it, so SIA builds hardware too: chemistry panels, injection skids, controls, and biofilm monitoring are engineered, fabricated, and commissioned in-house. The same equipment bench covers corrosion product and fuel deposit samplers, metered precoat systems, stabilized chromium decontamination, and advanced resin cleaning. Most of it is custom work: a station describes the problem, Structural Integrity Associates designs and delivers the system that solves it. Alongside that, radiation management, environmental, and emergency preparedness teams close the loop.