FirstEnergy Corp. said today it has agreed to pay $28 million to settle charges that it covered up safety violations at its company's troubled Davis-Besse nuclear power plant on Lake Erie in Oak Harbor, Ohio.

Separately, a five-count federal indictment issued yesterday by a grand jury charged two former FirstEnergy engineers and a consultant with lying to investigators, omitting key records and creating false documents. Nuclear engineers David Geisen and Andrew Siemaszko, along with contractor Rodney Cook, concealed acid leaks and failed to report problems they had inspecting parts of the reactor, according to the indictment.

In addition to the $28 million fine, FirstEnergy acknowledged that its employees "knowingly made false representations to the NRC," the Justice Department said in a statement (AP/USA Today).

In March 2002, investigators discovered that acid in cooling water ate a hole nearly all the way through the plant's 6-inch-thick nuclear reactor lid. If the corrosion had grown worse, the plant could have released thousands of gallons of slightly radioactive water inside the reactor's containment building.

NRC officials wrote a letter to plant owner FirstEnergy Corp. on Nov. 16, 2001, ordering the company to shut down Davis-Besse. But an NRC Inspector General report said the regulators allowed the plant to continue operations when FirstEnergy said a shutdown would be expensive and cause power outages.

NRC said the odds of a fuel core meltdown from that incident were 6 in 1,000. A normally functioning nuclear plant has a meltdown risk of 6 in 100,000 during any given year. After being shut down for two years, the facility began generating electricity again in March 2004.

After the incident, NRC ordered the owners of 68 similar reactors to determine whether their emergency cooling systems would work during an accident. NRC has called the mistakes the fourth-worst nuclear power incident in U.S. history, and it has fined the company more than $5 million (Greenwire, April 22, 2005).

Since 2002, FirstEnergy has spent more than $600 million on repairs and replacement electricity to serve customers while the plant was closed (Dave Scott, Akron Beacon Journal).

"The near fatal incident at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant is not the fault of a few bad apples, but the failure of an entire company and those responsible for running it," wrote Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in an e-mail (Funk/Tobin, Cleveland Plain Dealer). (All cites Jan. 20 unless noted.) -- DRL