Current Endorsement of Consensus Codes for Regulatory Technical Standards in Japan

In Japan, on January 1, 2006, “Ordinance of the Ministry for Establishing Technical Standards of Nuclear Power Generation Systems” (so called Ordinance No.62) was revised. The revised Ordinance No. 62 provides only functional requirements or performance requirement for nuclear power facilities, and detailed specifications — such as the detailed requirement of material and structure for a pressure vessel — are used to endorse consensus codes, like the Codes of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME). To endorse consensus codes, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the regulatory body, and the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization (JNES), a technical support organization, have done technical evaluations on several of the required consensus codes, and these results have been provided in the Regulatory Guide of Ordinance No.62. The activities of technical evaluation of the consensus codes were reported at the ICONE14^th. This paper shows their subsequent situation, and the activities of proposing new codes that are not yet in the Societies’ code.