Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., is calling for the Department of Justice to launch an investigation to find out of federal regulators were deceived by California utility executives at San Onofre nuclear power plant, the Associated Press reports.
Boxer is calling for the investigation after obtaining a 2004 internal letter from an executive of Southern California Edison that Boxer said "leads me to believe that Edison intentionally misled the public and regulators" to avoid an expensive review of four steam generators, according to the Associated Press.
A small radiation leak forced the plant to be shut down in January 2012; it has yet to be reactivated. After the leak excessive wear was detected in the almost brand new generators, ABC News reports.
The letter was written to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the manufacturer of the plant's generators. A statement by Edison explains that the letter was intended to make sure that flaws were not introduced into the design of the generator.
"These documents demonstrate the type of careful oversight that Southern California Edison exercised during the replacement steam generator project and also served to establish our expectations of MHI," Peter Dietrich, SCE senior vice president, told the Associated Press. "SCE's own oversight complied with industry standards and best practices. SCE would never, and did not, install steam generators that it believed would impact public safety or impair reliability."
The Associated Press reports that the key issue is that the replacement generators were far heavier and hundreds of design changes had to be made, meaning that the replacement wasn't a "like for like" replacement. SCE had avoided a review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by claiming that the new equipment was essentially identical to the ones it was replacing.
The letter obtained by Boxer proves that the SCE knew they weren't making a "like for like" swap. SCE Vice President Dwight Nunn says in the letter, "although the old and new steam generators will be similar in many respects they aren't like-for-like replacements."
"Edison knew they were not proceeding with a simple 'like-for-like' replacement as they later claimed," Boxer told the Associated Press.
Costs for the long standing shutdown of the plant have reached $553 million, according to ABC News.
