Jurors on Tuesday convicted a former nuclear plant engineer of hiding information from government regulators about the worst corrosion ever found at a U.S. reactor.
Prosecutors said Andrew Siemaszko and two other workers lied in 2001 so the Davis-Besse plant along Lake Erie could delay a shutdown for a safety inspection. Months later, inspectors found an acid leak that nearly ate through the reactor's 6-inch-thick steel cap.
The reports cited men in masks, a death squad van and other suspicious sights around the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Plant.
Authorities fielded a flurry of calls Saturday from concerned residents who saw men in ski masks, Ghostbusters, ballerinas, ninjas and Little Red Riding Hood.
The calls initiated numerous traffic stops over three hours as the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office, the Port Clinton Police Department's Harbor Patrol, Carroll Township and Oak Harbor Police and the U.S. Border Patrol responded to the calls.
A U.S. District Court jury in Toledo will effectively start pondering that question today.
The jury will hear opening statements in the second of two criminal cases federal prosecutors have filed as a result of the near-catastrophic rupture of Davis-Besse's reactor head in the spring of 2002. Mr. Siemaszko is charged with five counts of lying to the government.
"Ultrasonic tests completed Sunday night show 12 of the 69 nozzles on top of Davis-Besse's reactor head developed some sort of crack, eight more than previously known.
Those 12 are among 14 that FirstEnergy Corp. identified last week of having suspicious flaws, or indications, of a crack that needed further examination, Todd Schneider, utility spokesman, said.
A company report the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made public on March 15 stated that FirstEnergy could confirm only four cracks at that time. But the utility also said it hadn't yet tested 17 of the 69 nozzles."
Good morning and thank you for taking a few minutes from your busy schedules to be here today. The thoughts that I want to share with you today will be brief, but I assure you they are deeply felt, and I appreciate your interest in them.
Like many other organizations, we memorialize our successes and hold forth our highest aspirations as reminders of what we are working toward - first among these being our mission and our values. However, we should also be ready to memorialize a weakness or a stumble as a reminder of the ever-present need to avoid the subtle complacency that may result from a long history of success. Today we dedicate such a memorial - one that I hope will continue to remind both our staff and our licensees not only of the vulnerability of technology to degradation, but also the vulnerability of people to complacency.
Since the beginning of the
_ 1955: A U.S. government reactor makes Arco, Idaho, the world's first town electrified by nuclear power.
_ 1957: The U.S.' first commercial nuclear power plant becomes operational in Shippingport, Pa. (Nuclear reactors were already in service in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom). It was retired in 1982.
_ March 29, 1979: Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Middletown, Pa., melts down. No one was killed or seriously injured that day, but the public relations disaster sets back the industry for decades.
_ April 26, 1986: Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes in Soviet Ukraine, killing thousands. A radioactive cloud floats over much of Europe and large areas of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are contaminated.
_ 1996: The U.S.' last new reactor comes online at Watts Bar nuclear power plant near Spring City, Tenn. It took 22 years to finish Unit 1 and Unit 2 remains unfinished, becoming a poster child of the industry's inefficiency.
_ 2001: Worries about terrorist plots against nuclear power plants prompts new security measures. Governors send National Guard troops to watch over plants as public confidence about the safety of the installations drops.
_ 2002: Employees discover an acid leak after it nearly ate through a reactor vessel cap at the Davis-Besse plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio. Owner FirstEnergy Corp. pays a record $28 million fine and juries convict two plant employees of hiding the corrosion.
_ 2007: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission receives first full power plant application in 28 years. NRG Energy Inc.'s proposal for two reactors near Bay City, Texas, is one of 26 licenses pending at the agency.
_ February 2009: President Barack Obama calls for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal would almost certainly raise the cost to operate coal- and gas-fired plants and is seen as a boost for nuclear energy.
"Federal regulators are investigating allegations by a retired Millstone Power Station worker that plant owner Dominion puts profits ahead of safety and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not thoroughly managing safety issues.
David Collins of Old Lyme, a pro-nuclear retiree who took a company buyout in March, says the way Dominion has handled staffing cuts in key areas at the nuclear complex, along with an electrical mishap that forced a manual shutdown at the plant and the monitoring of fire doors, contribute to a "cover-up culture" that could compromise public safety just the way it was compromised in the late 1990s at the Waterford plant and in 2002 at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio.
Dominion officials deny the allegations about lax safety at the plant or that profits are motivating cutbacks in staffing."
A former FirstEnergy Corp. engineer was found guilty Tuesday afternoon by a U.S. District Court jury on three of five counts he faced for lying or withholding information from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about Davis-Besse's operating status in the fall of 2001.
A federal jury deliberated over three days before returning the verdict against Andrew Siemaszko, a native of Poland.
