NDT Practice in Kamloops: A Virtual Training Ground for Pipeline, Mine and Mill Inspection

Kamloops sits where the Thompson rivers meet, where the Trans-Canada and Coquihalla highways cross, and where both national railways run through town. It is also where a crude and refined-products pipeline hub, underground and open-pit copper mining, and a working pulp mill all sit within a short drive of one another. That combination creates a very particular kind of NDT workload: pipeline pump stations and relief tanks, heavy mobile mining equipment and crusher structures, and pressure equipment in a kraft pulp process. Atlantis built the first-ever online practical NDT simulation portal for practice and hands-on experience, and Practical NDT is designed for exactly this kind of mixed workload. It is an immersive, 3D, game-like environment, delivered in a browser or app, where you perform inspections on realistic virtual welds, tanks, pipe runs, tubes and components and get scored feedback the moment you finish. A trainee can learn the basics, a working technician can refresh the method the next job needs, and a Level III can benchmark a whole crew, all without shipping specimens up the Coquihalla or booking lab time in the Lower Mainland.

Why Kamloops Crews Need NDT Practice Between Assignments

The Interior inspection market is not dominated by one giant facility with a permanent in-house team. It is a network of sites that each need NDT periodically, often served by the same small pool of technicians. One month a technician might be on a pump station weld repair, the next on magnetic particle checks of a shovel boom at a mine, then on ultrasonic thickness readings in a pulp mill during a shutdown. Each of those tasks uses different techniques, different acceptance criteria and different physical habits. The technician who does all three is valuable precisely because they are versatile, but versatility has a cost: any single method might go untouched for months. Research on skill decay in technical trades is consistent on the general point that procedural skills fade without use, and anyone who has returned to a phased array unit after a long break knows the feeling of fumbling through setup menus that used to be automatic.

Physical practice is hard to arrange in a mid-sized Interior city. Flawed specimens with documented defects are expensive and usually held by training schools or large employers in bigger centres. Driving to Vancouver or Calgary for a refresher costs a day each way before any learning happens. And some of the most useful practice cannot safely be done on live equipment at all: you do not rehearse on a pressurised line, in a confined-space tank or inside a mill's operating process. A virtual NDT training environment solves the logistics. The defects are always there, correctly placed, in geometry that looks like the real thing, and a technician can put in twenty minutes of focused practice in a truck at a site gate or an evening at home.

The Trans Mountain Kamloops Terminal and Pipeline Inspection Practice

Kamloops is a genuine pipeline hub. Trans Mountain describes its Kamloops Terminal as both a distribution point for petroleum products shipped from Edmonton and a receiving point for products shipped from northeastern British Columbia, with two pump stations and two relief tanks of roughly 160,000 barrels of shell capacity. The expansion project brought major construction through the Kamloops area, including upgrades at the terminal and new pumping facilities along the corridor such as Black Pines, north of the city. Pipelines and terminals generate a characteristic set of inspection tasks: girth-weld examination during construction and repair, corrosion mapping on above-ground piping, screening of long runs where access is limited, and thickness surveys on tank shells and floors.

In Practical NDT, the Oil & Gas Site environment is where that work lives. Its 73 jobs span weld inspection, corrosion assessment, tube inspection and screening in a process-plant setting. The LRUT guided-wave scenarios teach what long-range screening can and cannot tell you: how a guided wave travels along a pipe, why welds, supports and flanges produce features you must not mistake for corrosion, and why a screening call always needs follow-up with a quantitative method. The Storage Tank environment puts a full-size tank in front of you for UT shell thickness surveys and MFL floor screening, the two most common tank tasks. Contact UT, PAUT and TOFD scenarios on welds let a technician rehearse the volumetric examination of girth and repair welds, and RT scenarios build image interpretation without a source anywhere nearby. None of this is specific to one operator; it is the everyday inspection vocabulary of any pipeline corridor, and the Kamloops area saw years of expansion-project construction on its doorstep.

Copper Country: Mining Equipment Inspection in the Thompson-Nicola

Mining is the other pillar. New Afton, a copper-gold porphyry mine about 10 kilometres west of Kamloops, has been producing since 2012, and Highland Valley Copper near Logan Lake, southwest of the city, is one of the largest copper operations in the country and a major regional employer. Mines are enormous consumers of NDT, but not always the kind people picture. The daily reality is heavy welded structures and rotating equipment under cyclic load: haul truck frames, shovel and loader booms, crusher mainframes, conveyor pulleys and shafts, grinding mill shells and trunnions, and the structural steel of processing plants. Fatigue cracking at weld toes and at geometric stress raisers is the recurring enemy.

That is where the Welding Workshop and NDT Lab environments earn their place. The Welding Workshop's 52 jobs on weld coupons and fabrication joints are ideal for practising magnetic particle testing at weld toes, getting yoke orientation right in two directions, and learning to tell a real fatigue crack from undercut or grinding marks. Visual testing scenarios teach the discipline of a systematic weld walk-down. Contact UT scenarios cover angle-beam examination of fillet and T-joints, the geometry behind many structural cracks on mobile equipment. The NDT Lab's 52 bench jobs let a technician practise straight-beam UT and calibration routines that transfer to shaft and component inspection. PT scenarios cover the non-ferrous and stainless components that magnetic particle cannot handle. For a maintenance planner at a mine, a crew that has drilled these scenarios is simply faster and more consistent during a planned shutdown, when every hour of downtime matters.

Methods Available in the Kamloops Scenario Library

Across its five environments, Practical NDT covers 12 methods. The surface methods are penetrant testing, magnetic particle testing and visual testing. The volumetric methods are contact ultrasonic testing, phased array UT, time-of-flight diffraction and radiographic testing. The electromagnetic methods are eddy current testing and magnetic flux leakage. The specialist methods are LRUT guided-wave screening, IRIS internal rotary UT for heat-exchanger and boiler tubes, and PMI for alloy verification. The platform includes 33 guided lessons that explain each method before you tackle scored jobs, and jobs are distributed across the NDT Lab (52), Welding Workshop (52), Aircraft Hangar (54) and Oil & Gas Site (73), plus the Storage Tank environment for shell and floor surveys.

For Kamloops, three methods deserve a special mention. IRIS matters because the Kamloops pulp mill, like any kraft mill, runs heat exchangers, evaporators and steam-generation equipment where tube wall loss must be measured; IRIS work tends to cluster in shutdowns, so most technicians get very little practice between outages. PMI matters because mills and process plants run mixed metallurgy, and verifying that the right alloy went into a repair is a quick check that is easy to get wrong without practice. Eddy current is useful for surface-crack detection on coated components and appears throughout the Aircraft Hangar environment, which is relevant in a city whose airport supports regional aviation and seasonal wildfire operations. The ultrasonic testing simulator scenarios tie all of this together, because UT in one form or another is the method a Kamloops technician will use most often.

Built for Trainees, Working Technicians and Level III Leads

New trainees begin with guided fundamentals. For a student coming out of a trades or engineering technology program at Thompson Rivers University or elsewhere in the Interior, the early scenarios establish how each method works and what good technique looks like: consistent probe pressure and couplant, full coverage with overlap, correct yoke spacing, proper penetrant dwell and developer application. Mistakes are explained immediately, and difficulty rises as competence grows.

Working technicians use the platform for refreshers and rare defects. A technician heading from a mine shutdown to a pipeline repair can spend an hour on girth-weld UT and TOFD scenarios the night before. Rare but important indications, such as a transverse crack, a lamination near a weld or a pit cluster at a tube support, can be practised on demand rather than waited for.

Level III and team leads can build and assign scenario sets that reflect upcoming work, benchmark the crew on identical jobs, and spot coverage gaps before they matter. That is useful for any small Interior contractor that has to prove to clients that its people are ready. The scenario library was designed by Anoop Rayavarapu, ASNT NDT Level III and founder of Atlantis NDT, who also leads Atlantis training, so the scoring reflects practical inspection judgement rather than trivia.

Practice Is Not Certification: How This Fits the Canadian System

Practical NDT is a practice and readiness tool, and it is important to be clear about what that means. It is not a certification, it does not count toward any certification, and it does not replace the practical examination on real specimens. In Canada, NDT personnel are certified to CAN/CGSB-48.9712, the Canadian adoption of ISO 9712, by the NDT Certification Body at Natural Resources Canada. The Canadian General Standards Board closed on 1 April 2026, but the standard remains valid and NRCan's certification services have continued. Certification requires formal training, documented experience and written and practical exams, with the practical exam performed on real specimens. Practical NDT is not recognised by NRCan or CGSB as training toward that certification.

Industrial gamma radiography in Canada also requires a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission exposure device operator certification, or direct supervision by a certified operator; the RT scenarios in the simulator involve no source and do not count toward it. Some employers, particularly those working on US-linked contracts, also use an ASNT SNT-TC-1A written practice, and Atlantis's formal courses on the NDT training page are SNT-TC-1A-based. Whatever scheme applies, the simulator is where you get the repetitions that make formal training stick and where you prepare for the NDT practical exam, not where you take it.

Regulators and Industry Context Around Kamloops

Several regulators shape inspection demand in the area. Technical Safety BC oversees boilers, pressure vessels and pressure piping across the province, which covers much of the pressure equipment at the pulp mill and in mine processing plants. The Canada Energy Regulator oversees federally regulated pipelines such as Trans Mountain. Mines operate under British Columbia's Health, Safety and Reclamation Code for Mines, which governs equipment inspection practices on site, and the CNSC governs radiography exposure devices wherever they are used. The Kamloops pulp mill, owned by Kruger since 2022, the New Afton and Highland Valley Copper mines, the Trans Mountain terminal and the CN and CPKC mainlines are all mentioned here purely as the region's industrial context. None is named as an Atlantis customer or partner.

What ties them together is geography. Kamloops is the service town for a large area of the southern Interior, and inspection companies based here cover sites from Merritt and Logan Lake to Clearwater and the Shuswap. That spread makes a browser-based NDT simulator more useful than it would be in a dense metro area: the platform travels with the technician, and the Level III can assign and review work without everyone being in the same building.

Bringing Practical NDT to Your Kamloops Team

Atlantis built the first-ever online practical NDT simulation portal for practice and hands-on experience, and a Kamloops rollout usually starts small. In a demo we look at the work your people actually do, whether that is pipeline and terminal inspection, mine maintenance NDT or pulp mill shutdown work, and map it to the right environments: the Oil & Gas Site and Storage Tank for pipeline and tank tasks, the Welding Workshop and NDT Lab for mining equipment and fabrication, and IRIS and PMI scenarios for mill and process work. Then a small group of trainees and technicians runs a pilot while a Level III assigns scenario sets and reviews the scores.

Pricing is quoted on request, and the platform is designed to be affordable, accessible and fully customizable. Request a Practical NDT demo for Kamloops, or ask about a pilot for your Interior crew. For formal courses, see NDT training and certification; for procedure writing and inspection program support, see consulting services. You can also email info@atlantisndt.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Practical NDT replace the practical certification exam?

No. It is a practice and readiness tool. CAN/CGSB-48.9712 certification from NRCan's NDT Certification Body requires formal training, documented experience and written and practical exams on real specimens, and the simulator does not substitute for any part of that. The same is true for an employer's SNT-TC-1A written practice and for CNSC exposure device operator certification.

Is it useful for mining NDT, not just oil and gas?

Yes. The Welding Workshop and NDT Lab environments cover magnetic particle, penetrant, visual and contact UT on welds and components, which is the core of mining equipment inspection: weld toes on frames and booms, structural joints, and shafts. The Oil & Gas Site and Storage Tank environments are there for pipeline, terminal and process-plant work.

What experience level is it for?

All of them. New trainees follow guided fundamentals, working technicians use rare-defect refreshers between assignments, and Level III leads build and assign scenario sets, benchmark crews and find coverage gaps. Difficulty adapts as skills improve.

Can our crew practise from remote sites?

Yes. Practical NDT runs in a browser or app, so technicians can practise from a camp, a hotel or home, and leads can review results remotely. That suits Interior contractors whose crews are spread across many sites.

How do we get a demo in Kamloops?

Use our contact form and tell us what methods and sites your team covers. We will run an online demo and suggest a pilot. Quotes are provided on request.

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