Many U. S. nuclear power plants are approaching 40 years of age and there is a desire to extend their life for up to 100 total years. Safety-related cables were originally qualified for nuclear power plant applications based on IEEE Standards that were published in 1974. The qualifications involved procedures to simulate 40 years of life under ambient power plant aging conditions followed by simulated loss of coolant accident (LOCA). Over the past 35 years or so, substantial efforts were devoted to determining whether the aging assumptions allowed by the original IEEE Standards could be improved upon. These studies led to better accelerated aging methods so that more confident 40-year lifetime predictions became available.Since there is now a desire to potentially extend the life of nuclear power plants way beyond the original 40 year life, there is an interest in reviewing and critiquing the current state-of-the-art in simulating cable aging. These are two of the goals of this report where the discussion is concentrated on the progress made over the past 15 years or so and highlights the most thorough and careful published studies. An additional goal of the report is to suggest work that might prove helpful in answering some of the questions and dealing with some of the issues that still remain with respect to simulating the aging and predicting the lifetimes of safety-related cable materials.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARYMany U. S. nuclear power plants are approaching 40 years of age and there is a desire to extend their life for up to 100 total years. Safety-related cables were originally qualified for nuclear power plant applications based on IEEE Standards that were published in 1974. The qualifications involved procedures to simulate 40 years of life under ambient power plant aging conditions followed by simulated loss of coolant accident (LOCA). Over the past 35 years or so, substantial efforts were devoted to determining whether the aging assumptions allowed by the original IEEE Standards could be improved upon. These studies led to better accelerated aging methods so that more confident 40-year lifetime predictions became available.In particular, three of the aging assumptions used were found to be overly simplistic. Thermal aging was typically carried out at a few high temperatures, then they were modeled with an Arrhenius function to derive an Arrhenius activation energy E a and finally the results were extrapolated to ambient conditions assuming no change in E a . Recent studies show that E a often drops at low temperatures, reducing the extrapolated lifetime. For radiation aging, an equal damage, equal dose assumption (e.g., no dose rate effects) was used. Careful studies have now shown that dose rate effects that reduce extrapolated material lifetime are both common and expected and come from several different mechanisms. Finally, for simulating combined radiation plus thermal environments, sequential aging (usually thermal aging followed by room temperature radiation aging) was allowed whereas rece...