A company hired to provide specialty steel bars for construction of the MOX facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has agreed to pay $4.6 million in damages after being accused of supplying “defective steel reinforcing bar,” the Department of Justice said this week.
Energy & Process Corp., a Georgia-based supplier of parts for the nuclear industry, will pay the sum to resolve the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, according to a DOJ statement Monday. The suit, dated Sept. 26, 2016, alleges that E&P “knowingly failed to perform required quality assurance procedures” in connection with the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being constructed to convert 34 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel.
CB&I AREVA MOX Services, the contractor building the facility, hired E&P as a subcontractor in July 2006 and signed another contract in March 2007. Together, the contracts were valued at $11.5 million.
According to the suit, the Energy Department paid E&P a premium to supply rebar for the MFFF that was supposed to meet stringent regulatory standards. “Standard ‘off-the-shelf’ or ‘commercial-grade’ rebar – a basic construction component that is routinely used in commercial construction projects – was unsuitable for use in the MOX Facility because it lacks the indicia of reliability and safety that is associated with rebar that has been manufactured and/or procured under the rigorous quality assurance standards required by the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission],” the Justice Department stated in the lawsuit. “To ensure its safe operation, the MOX Facility had to be constructed with rebar that met quality requirements.”
E&P spokeswoman Denise Vaughn wrote in a prepared statement that the company settled the suit but “denies any wrong doing and stands behind the quality of the product it provided which complied with applicable standards, as well as the quality assurance processes employed.”
