The Swedish nuclear industry had to start by instituting and building up a qualification body and from there develop a qualification scheme that, in principle, lived up to the requirements of the ENIQ metodology. The methodology document was, however, very general and transferring it's philosophy into rules and instruction for practical work, was no easy task. Many hard and expensive lessons have been learned in the past five years.

Some of the major challenges have been:

To establish the role and the responsibilities of the qualification body. This is a task that can seem straightforward on a general level, but becomes more complicated the deeper in detail you get.

To design and procure test specimens. Here again is a task that can seem straightforward on a general level. However it contains a number of treacherous pitfalls, such as what manufacturing techniques are used to produce and implant defects, how well do the implanted defects replicate real defects and how do you know if the manufacturer has actually succeeded in carrying out the implantation correctly?

What is actually technical justification and how is it implemented in the qualification process? These two questions led to a very active Swedish involvement in ENIQ's work in writing two of the probably most important recommended practices so far, on this subject.

After five years all parties involved, utilities, inspection vendors, qualification body and even the regulator have learned many hard and for some, expensive lessons. By presenting some examples it is the author's hope that others may profit from our experience and that it will lead to further discussions on the goals of inspection qualification and how these are best reached