Abstract
Fifty-five nuclear power plants of light water reactors (LWRs) in Japan including seven plants which have already reached a 30-year operation have been operated as of September 2006. The probabilistic fracture mechanics (PFM) method has been recently highlighted to rationally incorporate the uncertainties arising from the material properties, defect distribution, inspection quality and so on, unlike the conventional deterministic method. As a part of the materials aging degradation and structural integrity research for LWR components, the PFM analysis code PASCAL has been developed in JAEA. This code evaluates the conditional probabilities of crack initiation and fracture of a reactor pressure vessel (RPV) under transient conditions such as pressurized thermal shock (PTS). Sensitivity analyses for pre-service and in-service inspections have been performed according to JSME S NA1-2004 and the correlation between the results by deterministic analysis according to the JEAC 4206-2004 and probabilistic analysis based on PFM for the integrity of RPV under PTS has also been described.
