Advanced nondestructive examination technologies for measuring fatigue damage in nuclear power plant components

This paper presents recent results from an ongoing project at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) to develop advanced nondestructive methods to characterize the aging degradation of nuclear power plant pressure boundary components. One of the advanced methods, positron annihilation, is being developed for in situ characterization of fatigue damage in nuclear power plant piping and other components. This technique can detect and correlate the microstructural changes that are precursors of fatigue cracking in austenitic stainless steel components. In fact, the initial INEL test results show that the method can detect fatigue damage in stainless steel ranging from a few percent of the fatigue life up to 40 percent