Abstract: The design against brittle fracture and in-service defect evaluation of nuclear power engineering mainly use linear elastic fracture mechanics, and the evaluation is based on the fracture toughness of the material. The fracture toughness of the material needs to be determined by testing. First, the reference temperature is determined by the drop weight test and the V-notch impact test, or by master curve method, then the reference temperature and the material temperature are used as variables to establish a relationship to describe the fracture toughness of the material. The master curve method can obtain fracture toughness through the fewer sample tests and the higher confidence, so it has been used more and more in engineering. In this paper, the ASTM E1921 standard was used to measure the reference temperature of the main pipeline material of a nuclear power plant using the master curve method. The fracture toughness of the material was determined, and compared with the fracture toughness in Appendix G of ASME Volume Ⅺ. The results show that the fracture toughness of material obtained by the master curve method has higher value, and the conservative margin is reduced in engineering, so economy is improved.