An alternative method is presented for predicting failure probability of pipelines with corrosion defects in this paper. The failure of corroded pipeline occurs when the operating pressure is grater than the remaining strength of the pipeline, and a limit state function can be defined as the differences between the remaining strength and the operating pressure. Then, based on structural reliability theory, we can estimate the failure probability of corroded pipeline, which is dependent on elapsed time of the pipeline with active corrosion defects. In this study, a root finding (RF) method has been adopted to solve the limit state function instead of Monte-Carlo simulation (MCS) method which traditionally has been employed to solve those kinds of problems. The calculation results shows that there are only small differences between the RF and the MCS method but the RF has higher efficiency in calculation than the MCS.