French Codes Used for EPR and Comparison With ASME Practices

On December 2005, the French regulator issued a new regulation for French nuclear power plants, in particular for pressure equipment (PE). This regulation need first to agree with non-nuclear PE regulation and add to that some specific requirements, in particular radiation protection requirements. Different advantages are in these proposal, it’s more qualitative risk oriented and it’s an important link with non-nuclear industry. Only few components are nuclear specific. But, the general philosophy of the existing Codes (RCC-M, KTA or ASME) have to be improved. For foreign Codes, it’s plan to define the differences in the user specifications. In parallel to that, a new safety classification has been developed by French utility. The consequences is the need to cross all these specifications to define a minimum quality level for each components or systems. In the same time a new concept has been developed to replace the well known “Leak Before Break methodology” by the “Break Exclusion” methodology. This paper will summarize the key aspects of these different topics and regularly compare with ASME practices.