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The purpose of the Materials Aging and Degradation (MAaD) Pathway is to develop the scientific basis for understanding and predicting long-term environmental degradation behavior of materials in nuclear power plants and to provide data and methods to assess the performance of systems, structures, and components (SSCs) essential to safe and sustained nuclear power plant operations. The understanding of aging-related phenomena and their impacts on SSCs is expected to be a significant issue for any nuclear power plant planning for long-term operations (i.e., service beyond the initial license renewal period). Management of those phenomena and their impacts during long-term operations can be better enabled by improved methods and techniques for detection, monitoring, and prediction of SSC degradation. Elements of research necessary to produce the improved methods and techniques include the following: Integration of materials science understanding of degradation accumulation, with nondestructive measurement science for early detection of materials degradation. Development of robust sensors and instrumentation, as well as deployment tools, to enable extensive condition assessment of passive nuclear power plant components. Analysis systems for condition assessment and remaining life estimation from measurement data. It is likely that pursuing research for each of these elements in parallel will be necessary to address anticipated near-term deadlines for decision-making by plant owners and regulators (i.e., the first of the "second-round" license renewal announcements will likely start to be made in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe by the nuclear power plant owners). To address these research needs, the MAaD Pathway supported a series of workshops in the summer of 2012 for the purpose of developing R&D roadmaps for enhancing the use of Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) technologies and methodologies for detecting aging and degradation of materials and predicting the remaining useful life. The workshops were conducted to assess requirements and technical gaps related to applications of NDE for cables, concrete, reactor pressure vessels (RPV), and piping fatigue for extended reactor life. An overview of the outcomes of the workshops is presented here. Details of the workshop outcomes and proposed R&D also are available in the R&D roadmap documents cited in the bibliography and are available on the LWRS Program website (http://www.inl.gov/lwrs).
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