The in-service hardening and increase of the Ductile Brittle Transition Temperature (DBTT) of Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) steels are controlled at the atomic scale by the clustering of point defects with co-segregation of alloying elements like Cu, Mn, Ni, Si and P. The effort and strategy within the European Project PERFECT for developing advanced multi-scale numerical tools to predict this microstructure and the induced hardening as well as their experimental validation at the relevant scale will be presented. The first results obtained since January 2004, starting date of PERFECT, will be discussed and perspectives given.

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