LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer wants the Justice Department to investigate if California utility executives deceived federal regulators about an equipment swap at the San Onofre nuclear power plant that eventually led to a radiation leak, The Associated Press has learned.<\/p>\n
The California Democrat obtained a 2004 internal letter written by a senior Southern California Edison executive that she said “leads me to believe that Edison intentionally misled the public and regulators” to avoid a potentially long and costly review of four replacement steam generators before they went into service.<\/p>\n
The twin-domed plant between Los Angeles and San Diego hasn’t produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusually rapid wear inside hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water in the nearly new generators.<\/p>\n
The letter was written to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which manufactured the generators that now sit idle in a plant that once produced power for 1.4 million households.<\/p>\n
Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement Monday that she is providing the correspondence to the Justice Department and other federal and state officials to determine if Edison “engaged in willful wrongdoing.”<\/p>\n
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Eliot Brenner declined comment.<\/p>\n
An Edison statement said the letter reflected part of the company’s effort to ensure flaws were not inadvertently introduced into the generator design. It said Edison took numerous steps to ensure that Mitsubishi addressed the concerns.<\/p>\n
“These documents demonstrate the type of careful oversight that SCE exercised during the replacement steam generator project and also served to establish our expectations of MHI,” said Pete Dietrich, SCE senior vice president and chief nuclear officer.<\/p>\n
“SCE’s own oversight … complied with industry standards and best practices,” Dietrich added. “SCE would never, and did not, install steam generators that it believed would impact public safety or impair reliability.” Click here for the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer wants the Justice Department to investigate if California utility executives deceived federal regulators about an equipment swap at the San Onofre nuclear power plant that eventually led to a radiation leak, The Associated Press has learned. The California Democrat obtained a 2004 internal letter written by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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