Study on structural integrity assessment of reactor pressure vessels

Uno, Shumpei; Katsuyama, Jinya  ; Katsumata, Genshichiro*; Masaki, Koichi*; Osakabe, Kazuya*; Li, Y. 

Assuring the structural integrity of a reactor pressure vessel (RPV) is known as one of the critical issues to maintain the safe long-term operation of a nuclear power plant. Authors have been conducting extensive research on the improvement of structural integrity assessment methods of RPVs. In this paper, we describe some research results obtained from the recent activity including the review on the technical background of the methods and study on probabilistic methods for the applicability to the current code and standard.