Reuters: Regulatory News: U.S. senator accuses utility of misleading on San Onofre upgrade

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U.S. senator accuses utility of misleading on San Onofre upgrade May 28th 2013, 21:53 By Rory Carroll and Eileen O'Grady SAN FRANCISCO | Tue May 28, 2013 5:53pm EDT SAN FRANCISCO May 28 (Reuters) - A U.S. senator on Tuesday said that Southern California Edison misled the public and regulators on work at its troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant in order to avoid safety reviews and she called for a Justice Department probe. Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat of California who is chairman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, released a letter from an executive of the utility company that she said shows that the company knew that the replacement steam generators it installed in 2010 and 2011 were not "like-for-like." "These will be one of the largest steam generators ever built for the United States and represents a significant increase in size from those that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has built in the past," SCE Vice President Dwight Nunn said in the November 2004 letter to Akira Sawa of Mitsubishi, the company that built the faulty generators for SCE. Boxer said she planned to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to determine whether SCE's parent company, Edison International , engaged in willful wrongdoing. She also called for scrapping the company's plans to restart one of the plant's units this summer. "The correspondence shows that Edison knew they were not proceeding with a simple 'like-for-like' replacement as they later claimed," Boxer said. "Ultimately, Edison asserted that the replacement was 'like-for-like,' enabling them to avoid a full license review and a public hearing," she said. Boxer said that for a restart of the plant to "even be considered ... in the future, all investigations must be completed and a full license amendment and public hearing process must be required." Both reactors at the 2,150-megawatt San Onofre nuclear station, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, have been shut for 16 months following discovery of accelerated degradation of thousands of tightly packed tubes inside the units' steam generators. The continued outage is expected to put pressure on the state's power grid to meet electricity demand this summer as Californians turn on air conditioners to stay cool. In a statement on Tuesday, Southern California Edison denied any wrongdoing, saying that the letter simply shows SCE's appropriate oversight of Mitsubishi during the replacement process. The replacement steam generators were not different enough to trigger additional reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company said. "SCE's own oversight of MHI's design review complied with industry standards and best practices," said Pete Dietrich, SCE senior vice president and chief nuclear officer. "SCE would never, and did not, install steam generators that it believed would impact public safety or impair reliability." Loss of San Onofre's output has kept wholesale power prices in California high and helped keep the market price for carbon allowances above $14 a tonne since replacement generation from the carbon emissions-free plant is expected to be offset in part by output from natural gas plants. The prolonged shutdown has strained the Southern California power grid, raising the possibility of rolling outages. Edison International's chief executive has warned that if Unit 2 is not allowed to restart, the utility may decide before year-end to retire one or both units, citing growing costs and uncertainty for the company. NRC is currently weighing the company's plan to restart one unit, which would be run at no more than 70 percent capacity this summer. Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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