Nuclear power giant AREVA said this week that it had presented preliminary strategies to the French nuclear regulatory agency ASN – the French Nuclear Safety Authority — for studying and improving quality controls at two French facilities, the Le Creusot testing laboratory and the firm's Jeumont manufacturing facility.
Presented to the agency during an ASN audition, AREVA said its strategy takes into account findings by an independent quality control review conducted by the recently formed joint venture company Lloyd's Register Apave (LRA), which was forged out of a partnership with Lloyd's Register EMEA and Apave Sud-Europe and signed as a third-party supply chain inspector for Electricity de France in November 2010.
LRA initiated a quality review for AREVA's testing and manufacturing facilities in May 2015. AREVA said their inquiries also addressed questions raised by finding reported since then, one concerning the tensile testing performed at Le Creusot's laboratory and another related to welding defects on the thermal barriers of the reactor coolant pumps manufactured at the company's Jeumont facility.
AREVA's testing and manufacturing review also reflects 2005 revisions to mechanical specifications for nuclear pressure equipment and findings revealed in April that forgings on a reactor pressure vessel head, similar to one used in the Flamanville EPR, included an area with high carbon concentration, which, AREVA said, results in “lower than expected mechanical toughness values.”
The same process was used for some of the vessel heads designed for two reactors under construction in Taishan, China, were also made at Le Creusot facility.
The 2005 specifications relate to the vessel end cap components used in Flamanville, as they were manufactured between September 2006 and January 2007.
AREVA said that quality reviews “have been characterized, their consequences have been studied and those findings concerning EDF's facilities have been provided to the ASN by AREVA and EDF.
The quality control reviews are not over. AREVA said that it would establish a program to reinforce the quality culture at its sites “in order to achieve excellence in safety, quality and performance … [with] detailes and timeline of this plan [to be] determined before the end of 2015 and will be presented to the ASN in January 2016.”
“The guiding principles of this improvement plan are: To create a group of technical experts which will continue characterize and manage any possible quality deviations that could be found at Le Creusot and Jeumont and then, in collaboration with its customers, to evaluate the consequences for the acceptability of the equipment manufactured.
To start the second phase of the quality audit concerning the investigation into how deviations identified since 2004 at Le Creusot were processed, whatever the manufacturing step may have been. In order to ensure an exhaustive quality review of Le Creusot and to understand all origins of these dysfunctions, AREVA will mobilize both its internal audit organization as well as independent experts. The company will include its other equipment manufacturing sites, Saint-Marcel and Jeumont, in this quality review,” the company said.