31 Oct (NucNet): France’s nuclear safety authority ASN (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire) has upgraded to Level 2 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) an incident at a nuclear fuel assembly manufacturing facility concerning non-compliance in the identification, storage and internal transfer of wet fissile material.
ASN said FBFC, which is part of the Areva group and produces fuel assemblies for pressurised water reactors, reported on 26 September 2012 “a significant event” relating to non-compliance at its fuel factory fuel in Romans-sur-Isère in the Rhône-Alpes region, southeast France.
According to ASN, wet fissile material is transferred between workshops at the facility using special containers that must meet different identification rules to containers for dry fissile material.
On 24 September 2012, a worker found that wet fissile material was stored in a container labelled for dry material. ASN said the container was incorrectly labelled and the rules for storage and transfer of the material were not followed.
When the error was discovered, the transfer of the wet fissile material was suspended while a “comprehensive audit” was carried out of the contents of all containers. The audit showed similar “deviations from the rules” with other containers, ASN said.
ASN carried out an inspection of the FBFC facility on 28 September 2012 and said there were “breaches of identification” involving several containers. There was no impact on staff or environment, but the incident did indicate a “lack of safety culture”, ASN said.
FBFC had originally proposed that ASN classify the incident as Level 1 on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s INES scale. Level 1 is an ‘Anomaly’ and Level 2 an ‘Incident’.
Special packaging, handling and storage rules are mandatory when managing wet fissile material in order to prevent the risk of a chain reaction that could result in criticality incidents.
