Trending Analysis of Incidents Involving Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking on Alloy 600 Components at U.S. PWRs

Abstract

Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking (PWSCC) which occurs on Nickel based alloy (Alloy 600) is a worldwide concern since early 1980's. Recently several significant degradations that originate from PWSCC in the reactor coolant pressure boundary (RCPB)components have been observed at U.S. PWR plants (e.g. Oconee-3, Davis Besse). The United States Nuclear Regulation Commission (NRC) has issued generic communications to address this problem and, in response to the Davis Besse event in 2002, gave the inspection order EA-03-009 for the PWR licensees to implement the inspection of the reactor vessel heads depending upon the effective degradation years. As well, in Japan, PWSCC is considered one of the safety issues, in particular, for aged nuclear power plants and actually, some plants have experienced PWSCC on RCPB components. In the present study, we analyzed the U.S. experience with Alloy 600 degradation by reviewing the licensee event reports from 1999 to 2005 and examined the trend of them mainly focusing on affected components, characteristics of cracking and inspection approaches for detecting the PWSCC. This study indicates that PWSCC is found to be occurred on the RCPB components exposed to the environment with high temperature such as the reactor vessel head, and has the tendency to happen for specific manufactures and material according to the RCPB components. As well, it is shown that for several components, the non-destructive examination is generally needed to detect and/or confirm the PWSCC after the visual inspection and different repair techniques are applied depending on the components affected.