Southern California Edison (SCE) today made public a white paper,
supported by key documents, demonstrating that “for over 16 months,
Mitsubishi failed to offer any viable, implementable and licensable plan
that would safely and reliably restore the replacement steam generators
to 100-percent power for their promised 40-year operational life” at the San
Onofre nuclear plant.
SCE’s publication of these materials follows the Sept.
20 findings of the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission that Mitsubishi’s replacement steam generators
at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station failed, in part, due to a
flaw in Mitsubishi’s proprietary computer code used to design and
manufacture them.
The steam generator white
paper and timeline
made public today by SCE can be found at www.SONGScommunity.com/library.
According to SCE, once the Mitsubishi-designed and -manufactured
replacement steam generators failed, “SCE spent hundreds of millions of
dollars to investigate, repair and keep San Onofre in a state of
readiness for potential restart.”
Despite Mitsubishi’s contractual obligations, Mitsubishi failed to
provide SCE with complete documentation regarding the replacement steam
generators failures and potential repairs, “repeatedly delayed in
providing a final repair recommendation and failed to substantiate that
the repair proposal and the replacement proposal eventually offered
would resolve the underlying problems with Mitsubishi’s design.”
The SCE materials also detail SCE’s repeated attempts to gain access to
important documents in Mitsubishi's possession. Nonetheless, according
to the SCE white paper, “Mitsubishi still refuses to allow SCE access to
its documents.”
The SCE documents released today also illustrate how Mitsubishi failed
“to fulfill its contractual obligation to ‘repair or replace (as
appropriate) any defective part’ of the replacement steam generators ‘at
its sole expense with due diligence and dispatch.’” On the contrary,
“despite these constant meetings and other communications, Mitsubishi
failed to offer a repair plan that (1) solved the cause of the
replacement steam generator failures, (2) was feasible and
implementable, (3) was validated and (4) was licensable.”
In the end, according to the SCE documents, “in part because Mitsubishi
provided ‘no viable path to restoring SONGS to service, SCE is forced to
retire and decommission SONGS as a result of Mitsubishi's total and
fundamental failure to meet its contractual obligations, including its
obligation to repair or replace the defective replacement steam
generators with due diligence and dispatch.’”
SCE has already demanded that Mitsubishi reimburse the utility for the
costs incurred investigating the cause of the failed replacement steam
generators. To date, Mitsubishi has accepted responsibility for only $7
million of the $140 million spent investigating the problems caused by
Mitsubishi's failed design.
Earlier this month, SCE filed a Request
for Arbitration of the utility’s claims against Mitsubishi in an
attempt to recover all damages caused by Mitsubishi’s failed replacement
steam generator design.
Edison has made public key documents regarding the failure of
Mitsubishi’s replacement steam generators in a Digital Document Library
located at www.SONGScommunity.com/library,
although the Digital Library remains incomplete because of Mitsubishi’s
continued refusal to permit other key documents to be made public.
SCE announced
June 7 that it would permanently
shut down San Onofre Units 2 and 3, and begin the process to
decommission the nuclear plant. For more information about SCE, follow
us on Twitter
and Facebook.
About Southern California Edison
An Edison International (NYSE:EIX) company, Southern California Edison
is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a population
of nearly 14 million via 4.9 million customer accounts in a
50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern
California.
Copyright Business Wire 2013