I have been covering the widening scandal about substandard nuclear reactors parts that came from the Le Creusot foundry owned by Areva, the state-owned French nuclear reactor construction company. It was discovered in 2015 that some of the parts made by the Creusot foundry contained too much carbon which made them brittle and a lot less safe when used to construct a nuclear reactor.
In the fall of 2016, a new report on the problems at Le Creusot found that questionable parts from Le Creusot had been used in the construction of twenty eight nuclear reactors, eighteen of them in France. The eighteen French reactors were shut down so the parts could be checked. Areva was instructed to review over six thousand records of manufacture and quality control dating back to 1960 at Le Creusot. The French regulators now has evidence of irregularities in the manufacture of over four hundred parts from Le Creusot in the past fifty years.
Other countries including the U.S. became involved and sent representatives to France to investigate the review of Le Creusot parts because reactors in their countries contained parts from the foundry. It was initially reported that nine nuclear power reactors in the U.S. had parts from Le Creusot. When asked to identify which U.S. reactors were involved, Areva said that they believed that the identity of the reactors in question was proprietary information related to their nuclear reactor component business. Areva did provide a list of the reactors to the NRC. Areva claims that there is no evidence that any of the parts from Le Creusot pose a threat to public safety.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not agree that the Areva information was proprietary and they released the identities of the seventeen U.S. reactors that contained parts from Le Creusot.
A reactor head at the Xcel Energy Prairie Island reactor in Minnesota was identified in the Areva list. Xcel said that some of their reactor parts were forged at Le Creusot in the 1970s. An Xcel Energy spokeswoman said that, "Our testing and inspections are rigorous and have not identified any issues."
Reactor vessel heads for two of Dominion Resources reactors at the North Anna plant in Virginia had components with parts forged at Le Creusot. A Dominion Resources spokesman said “We have four components with forgings from Le Creusot and have verified that all are fine. They all check out and meet our design criteria and there are no problems."
Anti-nuclear groups are concerned about the safety of the parts from Le Creusot. An expert on nuclear energy at the Union of Concerned scientists, said the Le Creusot issue was "troubling from both trust and public safety perspectives" because to a large degree both the NRC and U.S. nuclear power plants depended on vendors to certify their work.
Developers of small modular reactors claim that manufacturing nuclear reactors in a factory and shipping modules to the operational site would be better than current practices because stricter quality control would be available. The scandal at Le Creusot would suggest otherwise.
Steam hammer illustration in Le Creusot foundry:
