Transferability of Fracture Mechanical Characteristics

Five laboratories from France, Hungary and the Czech Republic have solved a Project supported fmancially by NATO within the Science for Peace Program (under Nr. 972655) for three years. The project, titled Fracture ResistanceofSteelsfor Containers of Spent Nuclear Fuel, was focused (i) on the generation of data needed for the qualification procedure of a new container introduced by Skoda Nuclear Machinery and (ii) on a number of topics of scientific nature associated with the interesting field of transferability of fracture mechanical data-, It has been found during numerous conference presentations of project results that the knowledge developed within the project would be more attractive when published in a more comprehensive form. This was the reason why the final project workshop was arranged as a meeting of project collaborators and contributing invited experts working in very similar field. The main scope of the final project workshop, titled Transferability of Fracture Mechanical Data and held in Brno from 5 to 6 November 200I, was to bring together project collaborators with a number of invited international experts, both covering the spectrum of topics solved within the project and reviewing the project results in the presence ofthese specialists. A totalof34 colleagues from 7 European countries and the USA participated in the workshop.