San Onofre’s Safety Problems

While two whistleblower complaints at San Onofre nuclear plant made big news locally today, the plant has been dogged by numerous safety issues in the past, as our in-depth piece from former Los Angeles Times energy reporter Elizabeth Douglass found earlier this year.

From her story:

Mistakes and management problems continue to mount at the San Onofre nuclear plant, despite an unprecedented executive shake-up and a year-long effort to convince federal regulators and an industry ratings group that things are improving.

… Still, internal reports and Nuclear Regulatory Commission assessments indicate that the plant’s shortcomings include a degraded safety culture; falling behind on preventive maintenance; allowing equipment to become less reliable; not finding, analyzing and fixing problems adequately; not providing employees with sufficient training and written procedures to prevent mistakes; and lagging well behind its peers in worker safety.

Those problems have led to falsified fire watch records and caused such problems as a loose battery connection on a safety system to go undiscovered for years.

The news today only added to that. From the North County Times:

Two career San Onofre employees have charged that top managers at the nuclear power plant retaliated against them after they reported a willful violation of federal regulations by a plant welder who helped make steel containers that hold highly-radioactive spent uranium fuel.

— ANDREW DONOHUE