Safety aspects of the ageing and maintenance of nuclear power plants

The IAEA International Symposium on Safety Aspects of the Ageing and Maintenance of Nuclear Power Plants, held in Vienna from 29 June to 3 July 1987, was arranged with a view to providing a forum for the exchange of technical information on the approach to ageing phenomena at NPPs and for the exchange of technical and economic information on the approach to plant life extension. The symposium was attended by 141 participants from 31 countries and three international organizations. The symposium was the first organized by the IAEA on this subject. It consisted of six technical sessions, one poster session and three panel discussions. The proceedings, which include 35 technical papers presented during the symposium and four extended synopses of posters presented, should be valuable to a broad spectrum of experts involved in nuclear power programmes: technical and managerial staff engaged in NPP operation, regulatory body staff, consulting and architect engineering organizations, vendor technical and managerial staff and NPP technical and managerial staff involved in maintenance activities. Some NPPs are already approaching or are even beyond the end of their planned lifetime of 25 to 40 years of operation. In the year 2000 approximately 160 plants will be 25 years old and 69 will be 30 years old or more. The question of the safe operation of rather 'old' plants and the question of NPP life extension as an alternative to decommissioning will therefore be of growing importance worldwide. All the conference presentations were divided into six sessions as follows: General safety aspects of ageing (3 papers); Conceptual approach to the safety aspects of NPP ageing (5 papers); Methods for critical components and systems determination (8 papers); Methods and provisions to handle ageing phenomena during NPP operation (13 papers); General aspects of NPP life extension (6 papers); Technological aspects of NPP life extension (6 papers). A separate abstract was prepared for each of these papers. Refs, figs, tabs