ROSEMEAD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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.