Nov. 5--The National Nuclear Safety Administration is "very happy" with the progress being made at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility despite the facility again being cited and not having a customer for the multi-billion dollar product.

Thomas P. D'Agostino, NNSA administrator, was in Aiken on Wednesday to tour the facility and the other missions at Savannah River Site one day after a recent inspection report cited four specific faults with the MOX project's construction.

"These are incredibly minor issues ... very minor. They do not affect the integrity of construction at all," D'Agostino said. "There is strong support (for the project); in fact, the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was strongly supportive."

In a report made public Tuesday, four violations were noted from the most recent round of inspections.

From July 1 to Sept. 30, on-site and regional inspectors conducted a review of the facility's progress. The violations were all graded as severity level IV, the lowest level of infraction, and deal with technical specification modifications and red tape issues.

"It's all about getting the paperwork perfectly right," D'Agostino said. "The paperwork has to be correct, and we appreciate the NRC's look at this. The whole point is that this is a very complicated facility, a multi-billion dollar facility, many hundreds of workers. Rebar and concrete coming together in a very complicated way. It is not unusual to have some minor violations."

Beyond the negatives of being cited, the administrator thinks this report shows that the inspection system in place is doing its job.

"A violation sounds bad, but in reality that proves that the system is working," he said. "If we had many higher levels of NRC violations, that would be a concern. Level IV violations, frankly, are not unusual. We don't want to have that as a matter of course, but the reality is that these are fairly innocuous and they do not affect at all the safety, the integrity of the plant, and things are coming together quite nicely and we are very happy with that."

This was not MOX's first violation. Last year, an audit by the Department of Energy's inspector general found that both time and money had been wasted when construction materials were bought and installed that did not meet technical specifications. The report said that if it had gone undetected, the substandard materials could have, in a worst-case scenario, caused injury to workers or the public. When the study was released, it stated that "the MOX facility had incurred costs of more than $680,000 due to problems associated with the procurement of $11 million of nonconforming safety-class reinforcing steel."

On Wednesday, D'Agostino was upbeat about potential MOX customers when the project's complete. The project came under public scrutiny when Duke Energy backed out of a contract it had to buy the fuel.

However, the administrator said Duke is still one of several energy providers interested in the product.

"We have strong interest from multiple sources to buy the fuel," he said.

Construction of the facility is set to run into 2014 followed by a cold startup with inert materials. After extensive testing, production work should begin in 2016.

When operational, MOX will be capable of turning 3.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium into MOX fuel assemblies annually. The facility will be licensed for 20 years, with operations expected to continue into the 2020s, according to Shaw Areva MOX Services.

Contact Mike Gellatly at mgellatly@aikenstandard.com.

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