Environmental Fatigue Evaluation of a Korean Nuclear Power Plant Available to Purchase

In accordance with the recommendation of USNRC and the U.S. license renewal experiences, the effects of reactor coolant environment on the fatigue life have to be considered for the continued operation of operating nuclear power plants as well as for the design of new plants. Although various evaluation methodologies have been suggested to date, a wide range of comparison of the existing methodologies has not been performed. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the environmental effects on the fatigue life of a reactor pressure vessel and ASME Class 1 piping by the various methodologies and to investigate the effects of the pressure and moment stress histories on the environmental fatigue evaluation. The evaluation results show that the environmental fatigue evaluation results based on the design cumulative usage factors for the reactor pressure vessel and ASME Class 1 piping satisfy the requirement of the ASME code except for charging nozzle. However, when using operating cumulative usage factor, the environmental fatigue evaluation result for the charging nozzle satisfies the ASME code allowable. And the effects of the pressure and moment stress histories on the environmental fatigue evaluation are considered to be small when using the modified rate approach.