In-vessel ITER tubing failure rates for selected materials and coolants

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Abstract

Several materials have been suggested for fabrication of ITER in-vessel coolant tubing: beryllium, copper, Inconel, niobium, stainless steel, titanium, and vanadium. This report generates failure rates for the materials to identify the best performer from an operational safety and availability perspective. Coolant types considered in this report are helium gas, liquid lithium, liquid sodium, and water. Failure rates for the materials are generated by including the influence of ITER`s operating environment and anticipated tubing failure mechanisms with industrial operating experience failure rates. The analyses define tubing failure mechanisms for ITER as: intergranular attack, flow erosion, helium induced swelling, hydrogen damage, neutron irradiation embrittlement, cyclic fatigue, and thermal cycling. K-factors, multipliers, are developed to model each failure mechanism and are applied to industrial operating experience failure rates to generate tubing failure rates for ITER. The generated failure rates identify the best performer by its expected reliability. With an average leakage failure rate of 3.1e-10(m-hr){sup {minus}1}and an average rupture failure rate of 3.1e-11(m-hr){sup {minus}1}, titanium proved to be the best performer of the tubing materials. The failure rates generated in this report are intended to serve as comparison references for design safety and optimization studies. Actual material testing and analyses are required to validate the failure rates.

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