Critical components and monitoring techniques for Nuclear Power Plant life extension

The Department of Energy, as part of the point DOE/EPRI life extension program, has initiated a program to develop approaches for effectively monitoring the performance of components key to plant safety and availability during nuclear plant operation past 40 years. Development and implementation of such approaches will assure continued safe and economic plant performance. This paper describes the results of initial efforts that explored the use of systems modeling techniques to identify components which, if their reliability degrades or improves, could most impact safety. Results of an application of these techniques to the Surry Nuclear Power Plant and a comparison with the pilot plant categorization are presented. For selected types of components, the degradation and failure mechanisms are explored and state-of-the-art monitoring techniques are evaluated.