Monitoring the early stages of environmentally assisted cracking under light water reactor conditions is a challenging task but is getting more important in the context of a proactive aging management approach. From a rather large number of available corrosion monitoring techniques, only very few appear suitable for the detection of crack initiation and application in high temperature water environments (∼300°C). The most promising of these techniques (electrochemical noise, acoustic emission, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, alternating/direct current potential drop and high temperature imaging autoclave) are summarised and assessed in the current paper.
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