The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said it had sent a Confirmatory Action Letter to the Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel Facility in Columbia, S.C., where work has been suspended due to the unexpected accumulation of radioactive material in a scrubber.
The letter acknowledges the corrective actions that the company has agreed to undertake “before restarting some of is uranium processing operations,” the regulator said.
The first sign of trouble came around in May, when an annual maintenance shutdown inspection revealed an accumulation of “uranium bearing material in a scrubber system, which is designed to remove unwanted material from a number of plant processes,” the NRC said.
The NRC reiterated a previous claim that there were no compromise in personnel safety or environmental protection associated with the event and that Westinghouse has cooperated fully with the process of reporting and correcting the problem.
Still, an analysis of the scrubber found amounts of uranium “much higher than anticipated.” Consequently, the NRC sent an special inspection team to the plant to review the issue up close.
Although the full report on the inspection is not due for several weeks, the NRC said Westinghouse would take several measures before resuming work at the plant.
Westinghouse has agreed to shut down the affected systems in the facility, perform a root cause analysis investigation of the event, conduct a review and revision of safety culture, update its maintenance and managerial procedures, install physical modifications to the system, train personnel operating the system, review other potentially affected areas of the facility and retain an external nuclear criticality safety expert to oversee such functions.
“The commitments outlined in the CAL (Confirmatory Action Letter) will greatly reduce the likelihood of such incidents in the future,” said NRC Region II administrator Cathy Haney.
A final report on the incident is due 30 days after the inspection was completed.
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