Potential impact of enhanced fracture-toughness data on fracture mechanics assessment of PWR vessel integrity for pressurized thermal shock

The Heavy Section Steel Technology (HSST) Program is involved with the generation of enhanced fracture-initiation toughness and fracture-arrest toughness data of prototypic nuclear reactor vessel steels. These two sets of data are enhanced because they have distinguishing characteristics that could potentially impact PWR pressure vessel integrity assessments for the pressurized-thermal shock (PTS) loading condition which is a major plant-life extension issue to be confronted in the 1990's. A series of large-scale fracture-mechanics experiments have produced crack-arrest (KIa) data with the distinguishing characteristic that the values are considerably above 220 MPA · √m. The implicit limit of the ASME Code and the limit used in the Integrated Pressurized Thermal Shock (IPTS) studies. Currently, the HSST Program is planning experiments to verify and quantify for A533B steel the distinguishing characteristic of elevated the distinguishing characteristic of elevated initiation-fracture toughness for shallow flaws which has been observed for other steels. The results of the analyses indicated that application of the enhanced KIa data does reduce the conditional probability of failure P(F|E); however, it does not appear to have the potential to significantly impact the results of PTS analyses. The application of enhanced fracture-initiation-toughness data for shallow flaws also reduces P(F|E), and does appear to have a potential for significantly affecting the results of PTS analyses. 19 refs., 11 figs., 1 tab