EURATOM’s “Safeguards During Construction” Approach at AREVA’s MELOX Facility

AREVA’s MELOX facility located in the south of France is the world’s largest and highest capacity commercial Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication plant. Commissioned in 1995, this advanced, modern, and flexible facility has produced over 1,700 metric tons of reliable, high-quality Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) and Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) MOX fuel for a broad range of utility customers in Europe and Asia. To ensure the proper safeguarding of this facility, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) took an innovative and proactive approach that involved providing a dedicated team of inspectors to work directly with the plant’s designers, builders, and future operators during the project’s construction and commissioning phases. The key objective of this approach was to develop an effective and efficient safeguards regime that did not have a significant adverse impact on plant operations and productivity and did not result in a large dose uptake for operators or inspectors. Safeguarding a modern, high-throughput MOX fabrication plant can be a complex problem because the facility contains numerous highly automated systems that do not allow for human intervention in many areas. By working closely with AREVA during the early phases of the project, Euratom successfully met this challenge and created a “win-win” situation by achieving all of its objectives without penalizing plant productivity or impacting operator health or safety. The effective and cost-effective implementation of safeguards was achieved largely by taking advantage of existing operator equipment, processes, and production information. Through their early and extensive involvement in the project the Euratom inspectors also benefited by gaining extensive knowledge of MELOX’s technical systems and production processes. The Euratom/MELOX “Safeguards During Construction” interaction is an early practical example of a “Safeguards-By-Design” (SBD)-type approach. The involvement of safeguards authorities even earlier in the design phase of nuclear facilities (i.e., “SBD”) should result in similar mutual benefits.