Analysis of the methodologies used in the environmental factor assessment in actual transients of nuclear power plants

Components of nuclear power plants (NPPare submerged in a characteristic environment that reduces their fatigue life. Several expressions have been obtained with the aim of calculating the environmental effect under given conditions, but, as yet, no one has managed to develop a methodology of application for the evaluation of transients, and in particular, for the actual transients that occur in plant and are analyzed by means of monitoring systems. In this work the methodologies used nowadays for the calculation of the environmental factor are analyzed and discussed, and in addition, a new procedure, easily implementable in the current monitoring systems, is proposed.