Safety margin determination of the nuclear power plant reactor pressure vessel with taking into account warm pre-stress effect

Nuclear Power Plant Safety

In the last decade nuclear reactors have proven to be a source of electrical energy economically competitive with conventional means of power production. With the resulting increase in orders for nuclear power stations there has been a corresponding increase in public awareness of the safety and environmental aspects of these facilities. This public awareness has been evidenced by the number of...

Safety margin sensitivity analysis for model selection in nuclear power plant probabilistic safety assessment

The safety assessment of Nuclear Power Plants makes use of Thermal-Hydraulic codes for the quantification of the safety margins with respect to upper/lower safety thresholds, when postulated accidental scenarios occur. To explicitly treat uncertainties in the safety margins estimates within the Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) framework, we resort to the concept of Dynamic P...

Positron Annihilation Measurements on Nuclear Reactor Pressure Vessel Steels

Positron Annihilation Spectroscopy is a valuable microscopic method to study radiation damage in nuclear reactor pressure vessel steels. At SCKoCEN, a new positron lifetime setup, suited to measure positron lifetimes in irradiated steel, is being constructed. The particularity of this setup is that the prompt count rate originating from the induced 60Co-activity in the steel is highly reduced. ...

Grain Boundary Segregation in Commercial Nuclear Reactor Pressure Vessel Steels

Grain boundary (GB) segregation of impurity/solute atoms in surveillance test specimens of a commercial western-type pressurized water reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steel has been observed by using state-of-the-art 3D atom probe (3DAP) field ion microscope (laser-assisted local electrode-type atom probe: laser-LEAP). The GB segregation is considered to be an origin of the embrittlement of the R...

Reactor Pressure Vessel Embrittlement—i