Stress Corrosion Cracking of Current Structural Materials in Commercial Nuclear Power Plants

This paper summarizes the structural materials used in light water reactors (LWR), their historical degradation evolution vs. time, improvements and subsequent vulnerabilities discovered, and possible future degradation phenomena over long-term operation. Little was known about high-temperature water environments 50+ years ago, and reasonable but inadequate judgments were made on structural materials based partly on simple, short-term tests and...