FRACTESUS Project overview: objectives, organisation and initial findings

This paper presents an overview of the FRACTESUS project, which is part of the EURATOM work programme 2019-2020, topic NFRP-04: Innovation for Generation II and III reactors. FRACTESUS aims to prove the reliability of determining the fracture toughness of reactor pressure vessel steels using sub-sized specimens, with special emphasis on mini-CT specimens (or 0.16 CT specimens). To achieve this main goal, 22 organisations from Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan launched the project in 2020, completing the first phase of the experimental works in 2022. After providing some background information about the project objectives and organisation, the present work gathers some initial findings and conclusions obtained so far.