Nov. 7--It could take more than a month for federal regulators to decide whether to take action against Babcock & Wilcox for possible violations, officials said Friday.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a conference with B&W officials to discuss four "apparent violations" in the company's performance in ensuring safety and reporting emergencies. The issues relate to an event in July when uranium was found in a location without safety checks at B&W's Mt. Athos site in Campbell County.

NRC officials voiced several concerns and B&W explained what happened in July, and how they have adjusted their procedures since then.

B&W employees "have done a lot of work to try and understand the root cause of this situation," said Winfred Nash, president of B&W Nuclear Operations Group. "I do believe that we have put corrective actions into place that would prevent this from happening again."

The conference was held in Atlanta and was broadcast in a conference call.

In the July event, an employee discovered liquid in the cooling reservoir of a saw that cuts nuclear fuel components. That caused concern because the reservoir had not been monitored in five years, since B&W installed a replacement cooling system.

Employees examined the contents of the reservoir, found uranium there and declared an alert, a low-level emergency. Later they determined that there was not enough uranium there to be dangerous.

In Friday's conference, Eugene Cobey, deputy director of the NRC's division of fuel facility inspection, outlined several concerns that regulators had about the event.

Cobey said B&W violated its own emergency response plan by waiting two and a half hours to declare an emergency. It should have declared the emergency as soon as it discovered that uranium could be outside a safe place, he said.

David Ward, manager of safeguards and safety at the Mt. Athos plant, said that when employees examined the reservoir, they did not think they would find uranium. Everything about the situation seemed stable. "I believe without question that if our staff had encountered ... an active event they would have declared an emergency right then, not two and a half hours later," Ward said.

B&W has revised its flow chart guiding the response to potential emergencies so that alerts would be declared earlier, he said.

Three more "apparent violations" concerned issues that caused the uranium to be in the saw's reservoir.

According to Cobey, B&W should have:

- disabled the saw's reservoir in 2004 when a new cooling system was installed;

- evaluated the potential for the reservoir to collect uranium and risk an accident;

- provided controls and procedures to make sure the reservoir could not be come a problem.

B&W officials said that they have increased their attention to evaluating potential hazards and looking more carefully for places where fluids containing uranium could accumulate.

They also said that their calculations showed that the reservoir collected uranium in such small increments that the reservoir would have overflowed and drawn attention before it held enough uranium to cause a nuclear reaction.

After a conference like the one held Friday, regulators usually issue a decision in four to six weeks, NRC regional administrator Luis Reyes said. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday this month, it is more likely to take six weeks, he said.

If the NRC decides to take action against B&W, the actions could include fines or increased inspection activity.

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