A Study on Application of Fatigue Correction Factor for Environmental Fatigue Evaluation of Pressurizer Surge Line

Nuclear power plants applying for the continued operation over design life are required to address the effects of reactor water environment in fatigue design requirement of the ASME Code. Reactor water environmental effects are generally evaluated by calculating fatigue correction factors on fatigue usage. This paper describes the application for pressurizer surge line of environmental fatigue correction factors and the strain rate impact in the application. From this paper, the environmental fatigue correction factors resulted from the assumption of a step change in temperature are especially compared with those calculated from the data measured during plant startup. As a conclusion of this paper, the design transient conditions applied to the fatigue design may be conservative in case of the environmental fatigue evaluation.