The computer fault revealed by COGEMA: no effect on the quality of MOX fuel produced at Cadarache

Press release

March 30, 2000

COGEMA to check all the previous fabrication records and offered to help it in this project.

At COGEMA, every pellet is subject to thorough inspection during fabrication. These controls are performed and fully documented. Before the pellets are used to fabricate fuel rods, a second statistical audit is performed by random samplings, as a quality guarantee. Faulty data acquisition was detected by this second audit, on a batch of about 7,000 pellets. Due to a software error in the evaluation and counting program, which has since been corrected, data were acquired on 60 pellets instead of the necessary 100. The 60 data series were subsequently found to demonstrate that the pellets met the quality specifications.