Education and Training Series #69: Development of In-Service Inspection Rules for Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactors Using the System Based Code Concept
Part of a webinar series hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group since 2016.
Who should attend?
Policymakers, industry professionals, regulators, researchers, students, the general public.
About the "GIF Education and Training" Webinars
These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.
These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG).
About this Webinar
Effective and efficient in-service inspection (ISI) is crucial to maintain safety of nuclear power plants and to suppress operation costs which affect the power generation costs directly. Hence, ISI rules need to be developed rationally by considering relevant features of the reactor type and design of an individual nuclear power plant. Sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) have several desirable features such as excellent compatibility between purity-controlled sodium and structural materials while traditional volumetric and surface tests are not as easily performed as in light water reactors due to the limited accessibility to components containing the sodium coolant. In this Webinar, development of ISI rules for SFRs using the System Based Code (SBC) concept is introduced. The SBC concept consists of three parts: 1) design to reliability target that must be met throughout the service life, 2) margin exchange among the various technical areas of concern such as design, inspection, fabrication, and fitness for service, and 3) expand technical options by the timely adoption of newly developed technologies that are not in current codes and standards. Such a flexible and consistent concept is suitable to develop ISI rules by taking account of individual features of SFR plants. A unique logic flow to determine ISI requirements by using reliability targets for components is discussed, and the procedure to derive the reliability targets from plant safety requirements and to evaluate corresponding structural reliability is presented.
Presentation made during the webinar
Meet the presenter
Dr. Shigeru TAKAYA is a principal researcher of Fast Reactor Cycle System R&D Center of Japan Atomic Energy Agency. He earned his Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2003. His main areas of research interests are structural integrity evaluation at elevated temperatures, maintenance technologies for SFRs, and optimization of design and ISI requirements on SFRs through plant life cycle based on the SBC concept. He also works on development of codes and standards for these fields and participates in several committees of ASME as well as JSME. He serves as the chair of Subgroup on Elevated Temperature Design in JSME, and also the chair of ASME/JSME Joint Working Group on RIM Processes and SBC in ASME.