Inspectors
from the U.S., China and four other nations visited Areva SA’s Le Creusot Forge in central
France earlier this month to examine the plant’s quality controls and comb
through its internal records.
A
string of discoveries triggered the newly expanded review: First, French
investigators said they found steel components made at Le Creusot and used in
nuclear-power plants across France had excess carbon levels, making them more
vulnerable to rupture. Then, the investigators discovered files suggesting Le
Creusot employees for decades had concealed manufacturing problems involving
hundreds of components sold to customers around the world.
The
disclosure of flaws covered up by Le Creusot led to two reactor shutdowns this
summer in France, and in September authorities ordered Areva to check 6,000
manufacturing files by hand, covering every nuclear part made at Le Creusot
since the 1960s.
“I’m concerned that there keep being more and
more problems unveiled,” said Kerri Kavanagh, who leads the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission’s unit inspecting Le Creusot. Regulators are considering
returning to Le Creusot or inspecting Areva’s Lynchburg, Va., offices to deepen
their probe of the plant, a U.S. official said.
On
Wednesday, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into whether Le
Creusot’s activities were fraudulent and dangerous, according to a spokeswoman
for prosecutors.
“What
we see now at Le Creusot is clearly unacceptable,” said Julien Collet,
assistant general manager at France’s Nuclear Safety Authority.
Areva
executives have acknowledged the records falsifications and blamed them on a
breakdown of manufacturing controls spanning many decades at Le Creusot. Areva
has since tightened its controls and is cooperating with the regulators’
reviews, company officials said.
“We’re
facing a problem of ‘quality culture,’ ” said David Emond, a senior Areva
executive in charge of Le Creusot, in an interview. “ ‘Quality culture’ means
declare a problem so it can be addressed, whether it’s serious or not.”
Areva
executives said Le Creusot stopped falsifying documents in 2012, when oversight
of quality control was removed from an internal office at the factory to a
different Areva factory in Saint-Marcel, France. French regulators said they
are investigating that claim.
Beyond
France, regulators are trying to determine whether other nuclear facilities
that relied on components from Le Creusot are safe. Finnish inspectors visiting
the forge last week said they learned of potential flaws in a component slated
for a reactor in the southwestern island of Olkiluoto. In the U.S., the NRC has
identified at least nine nuclear plants that use large components from Le
Creusot.
Still,
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the agency’s “examination of the evidence, to
this point, fails to raise a safety concern” with U.S. facilities, adding that
“no final conclusions have been reached.”
Le
Creusot’s production and documentation practices uncovered by the regulators
risk undermining public trust in an industry still struggling to recover after
the disaster caused by an earthquake and tsunami at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear
plant in 2011. That manufacturing irregularities have been found in France—a
leading exporter of nuclear technology to the rest of the world—is even more
troubling for the industry.
‘Likely we have seen only the tip of the iceberg.’
—Mycle Schneider, nuclear
energy consultant
France
occupies a key place in the supply chain for the global nuclear power industry.
With a history dating back to the dawn of the industrial revolution, Le Creusot
is one of just a handful of manufacturing sites around the world capable of
forging the enormous steel components that lie at the heart of nuclear power
plants.
Officials
and experts said the instances of manufacturing problems at Le Creusot are rare
in the nuclear industry, where strict adherence to production and operating
rules forms a crucial buffer against nuclear accidents.
“Having
worked for over 30 years in France, I did not think this was possible for this
country,” said Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear energy consultant.
“Likely we have seen only the tip of the iceberg.”
French
investigators say the most serious safety threat they uncovered at Le Creusot
concerns a nuclear power plant in the eastern French town of Fessenheim, on the
border with Germany. Areva inspectors earlier this year unearthed a 2008
document at Le Creusot that showed a piece of flawed steel had been left on the
protective casing of a steam generator at Fessenheim. That component weighs
hundreds of tons and transforms the reactor’s heat into steam under immense
pressure.
“Warn
the [supervisor] during tracking to determine next steps,” wrote one employee
in an excerpt of the document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
French
regulators and Areva inspectors said they found the document inside a dossier
barré—a folder Le Creusot marked with two dashes that investigators said
signaled it shouldn’t be shown to customers or regulators. Fessenheim later
installed the part relying on documents Le Creusot provided to regulators that
made no mention of the problems.
Electricité de France SA, which this year
agreed to buy most of Areva’s nuclear-reactor business including Le Creusot,
shut the reactor at Fessenheim this summer after learning of the dossier barré.
More than 200 of these previously undisclosed files have been found this year,
the earliest dating from the 1960s.
EDF
said initial tests of its Fessenheim reactor showed it is safe to operate even
with the flawed steel on the steam generator. The French nuclear regulator is
examining the issue, a process that officials said would take months.
Last
week’s inspection has turned up a concern with one of Areva’s next-generation
reactors, the European Pressurized Reactor under construction in Finland,
versions of which are also planned for plants in China, France and the U.K.
Of
the nine plants in the U.S. with parts from Le Creusot, at least one has a
component with documentation problems, according to the NRC. Areva informed its
owner, Dominion Resources Inc., that a
manufacturing problem wasn’t detailed in final documents given to Dominion for
its Millstone plant in Connecticut. Areva and Dominion say the discrepancy
isn’t a threat to the safety of the Millstone reactor.
