SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
June, 18 2012, 03:10pm EDT
Contact:
Kelly Trout, 202-222-0722, ktrout@foe.org
Damon Moglen, 202-352-4223, dmoglen@foe.org
Nuclear Watchdog Petitions NRC to Require Relicensing of Faulty San Onofre Reactors
Friends of the Earth alleges Edison misled NRC on replacement steam generators
WASHINGTON
Friends of the Earth today filed a legal petition to require the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep the crippled reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shut down until and unless their operator, Southern California Edison, obtains a license amendment.
The troubled San Onofre reactors, located in Orange County, Calif., were shut down in January after a leak of radioactive steam. Subsequent investigations commissioned by Friends of the Earth have revealed that the new steam generators, which have only operated for 11 and 22 months respectively, are defective. The petition filed today contends that Edison misled the NRC about the steam generators' design, which allowed the utility to run the reactors with fundamentally flawed technology, endangering 8 million Californians who live within 50 miles of the plant.
"The crisis at San Onofre is the result of a perfect storm of error," said Damon Moglen, climate and energy director for Friends of the Earth. "On the one hand, Edison made significant design changes without seeking an amendment to its license as required by NRC regulations; on the other hand, the NRC appears to have been asleep at the regulatory wheel. The result was the failure of critical equipment that could endanger the lives and livelihoods of millions of Southern Californians, and leaves California ratepayers stuck with the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of defective technology."
The petition filed today states that Edison -- while fully aware that it was making serious changes in the design of the new steam generators -- deliberately mischaracterized the new technology as a "like for like" replacement, thereby avoiding NRC or public review of the altered design. Under NRC rules, the substantial changes to the design of the new steam generators required a rigorous license amendment review by the NRC, including an adjudicatory public hearing. Instead, the agency accepted Edison's misleading characterization.
"The bottom line is that these changes should have required a major review and a new license," said Dave Freeman, former head of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and a senior advisor to Friends of the Earth. "The San Onofre steam generators were in fact operated without the necessary license until they broke down. Federal regulators must be forced to follow their own rules and prove to Californians that this is about ensuring their safety -- not protecting Edison's profits."
A series of technical reports, produced by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and Fairewinds Associates commissioned by Friends of the Earth, have revealed that the extensive design changes made by Edison raised 39 different safety issues which should have triggered a license amendment review under NRC regulations.
"Any one of these 39 separate safety issues should have triggered the license amendment review process by the NRC," said Gundersen. "By claiming that the steam generator replacements were a 'like-for-like' design and fabrication, Edison avoided the more rigorous license amendment process that should have prevented this accident and the ongoing crisis at San Onofre."
In conjunction with the filing, Friends of the Earth is asking the NRC to stay any effort by Edison to restart the San Onofre reactors until a thorough license amendment review, including an adjudicatory public hearing, can assess the risks and ensure public safety is protected.
Summary of the legal action filed today by Friends of the Earth regarding the San Onofre reactors.
Download a pdf copy of the legal petition filed with the NRC today.
See Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates' supporting declaration to the legal petition.
Download a pdf copy of the stay order filed with the NRC today.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
'Wallowing in Corruption': Lobbyist Who Helped Ultra-Rich Dodge Taxes Now Heads Trump Tax Office
"By putting a professional tax dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations."
Jul 15, 2025
A corporate lobbyist who for decades has helped major companies and rich Americans dodge taxes is now serving as the U.S. Treasury Department's top tax policy official, a position in which he will write rules implementing the newly passed Republican budget law.
That role is "enormously powerful," The New York Times' Jesse Drucker wrote in a Monday profile of Ken Kies, whom the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed as assistant treasury secretary for tax policy in a party-line vote last month. President Donald Trump selected Kies for the position in January.
The Republican budget measure, which President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month, contains around $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that will flow disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans over the next decade, according to nonpartisan analysts.
"By putting a professional tax-dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations like those Ken Kies has spent his career looking out for," Leor Tal, campaign director for the progressive advocacy group Unrig Our Economy, said in a statement Monday.
"As families struggle with rising prices from Trump's tariffs and face devastating cuts to Medicaid and SNAP," Tal added, "Republicans are doubling down on helping the richest of the rich, while working people pay the price."
In his role as a lobbyist whose client list has included Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Microsoft, and other corporate behemoths, Kies has helped secure major tax giveaways for large companies and wealthy Americans—including in the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that the new Republican budget package extends.
"In the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Kies successfully pushed for legislation to make such offshore tax dodges even easier to execute. During the Obama administration, he fended off another attempted crackdown on those strategies," Drucker wrote Monday. "In 2017, as part of a sweeping package of tax cuts signed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Kies lobbied for a new tax break that provides a 20% deduction to certain businesses, which overwhelmingly benefits the richest Americans."
Drucker noted that in his new position, Kies "will oversee about 100 attorneys and economists at the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy, a powerful corner of the federal government."
"The office issues regulations to help the government administer tax laws and provides guidance that can render the latest tax-dodging strategy a gold mine—or doom it," he added.
Kies previously served as managing director of the Federal Policy Group, a lobbying firm at which he "delivered significant legislative and regulatory results for his clients, which include major corporations, trade associations, and coalitions of companies with common objectives," according to a since-removed biography of Kies.
"Mr. Kies has led coalition efforts to enact legislation responding to the World Trade Organization's ruling against U.S. foreign sales corporation benefits, to avert enactment of broad 'corporate tax shelter' legislation that would have an adverse impact on legitimate business transactions, and to reverse Treasury regulations targeting 'hybrid' arrangements of U.S. multinational corporations, among other projects," the biography stated.
Highlighting the Times profile of Kies, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote Monday that the Trump administration is "wallowing in corruption."
"Five trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest, written and administered by the wealthiest," she wrote. "On the backs of stripping healthcare and food from working and poor people. Shame on you."
In addition to implementing the new Trump-GOP law, Kies could be positioned to help deliver another sizable tax break to the rich.
The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported last week that on the heels of passage of the GOP budget law, right-wing organizations and Republican lawmakers are set to push the Trump administration to unilaterally "drastically reduce what investors pay on their capital gains."
"The plan rests on changing how the Treasury Department calculates those taxes," Stein wrote. "The highest-earning 1% of Americans would receive 86% of the benefits from indexing capital gains to inflation, while the bottom 80% of income earners would get just 1% of the benefits, Penn Wharton projected in 2018."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, wrote in response to Stein's reporting that "after gutting health care for millions of Americans and passing massive tax breaks for billionaires, Republicans are now working on even MORE tax breaks for the ultra-rich."
"They aren't interested in fighting for working families—only their rich friends," Boyle added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Millions Kicked Off Medicaid? 'Don't Eat Carrot Cake,' Says Administrator Oz
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," replied Democratic Sen. Mark Warner.
Jul 14, 2025
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared on Fox Business on Monday, where he presented a carrot cake to celebrate Medicaid's 60th birthday and brushed aside concerns about the millions of Americans likely to lose their healthcare coverage under recently passed Republican legislation—by telling people to not eat carrot cake.
Oz—the multimillionaire erstwhile celebrity surgeon, purveyor of "miracle" cures, and failed U.S. Senate candidate—gave Fox Business host Stuart Varney what he called a "MAHA Medi-cake" before proceeding to extol the virtues of Medicaid, the program launched during then-President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" agenda that provides health insurance to more than 70 million lower-income Americans.
Medicaid "was a promise to the American people to take care of you if you are having problems financially or if you were having an issue because you're older and needed healthcare," Oz said. "And it changed the country in a good way for many reasons."
"But we're all in it together, Stuart," he added, "which means we'll be there for you, the American people, when you need help with Medicaid and Medicare, but you've got to stay healthy as well. Be healthy, do the most you can do to really live up to the potential, your God-given potential to live a full and healthy life, you know, don't eat carrot cake, eat real food."
17 million people are going to lose their health insurance because of the Trump administration.Dr. Oz's advice is “don’t eat carrot cake.”
[image or embed]
— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) July 14, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Social media users roundly ridiculed Oz's remarks, with criticism centered around the estimated 17 million people who will be left uninsured under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month. The legislation contains the largest Medicaid cuts in history.
"Why don't you pry carrot cake out of my cold, dead hands and give us back Medicaid coverage for millions instead," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote on Bluesky.
Another Bluesky user wrote, "Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Yet another said, "Um... your boss eats McDonald's every chance he gets and you are judging people eating carrot cake," a reference to Trump's legendary fondness for Big Macs, Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and vanilla shakes.
Still another quipped, "First he came for my crudites, now my carrot cake."
"Carrot cake didn't give me cancer, dumbass."
Over on X, one account with over 130,000 followers said: "What an insensitive prick as he brings a piece of carrot cake to Stu Varney during the interview. Republicans seem so gleeful to be hurting Americans. This is why millionaires and billionaires should never be in Congress or the [White House]."
The Occupy Democrats X account also weighed in, posting, "It's not enough for them to take away our healthcare, Republicans want to blame us for getting sick."
"The idea that avoiding carrot cake in favor of healthier foods will somehow render Americans immune to health problems is insulting in the extreme," Occupy Democrats continued. "Rather than 'let them eat cake,' he's telling us 'do not eat cake,' but the sentiment is every bit as out of touch as Marie Antoinette's apocryphal quote."
"MAHA stands for 'Make America Healthy Again,' an Orwellian phrase deployed by an administration that is actively making Americans sicker by stripping away their healthcare," the account added. "This is what Republicans really think of the American people. They ram through policies making our lives worse in countless ways, then they laugh at us and spit in our faces. There has never been a more gleefully spiteful political movement."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Admin Announces $200 Million Contract for Musk's AI After Grok Hitler Incident
"Stop entertaining this man. Stop giving him money. It's really that simple," said one critic of Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth.
Jul 14, 2025
The U.S. government on Monday awarded a $200 million contract to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, despite the tech billionaire's ongoing spat with President Donald Trump and his AI chatbot's recent praise for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced contract awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Musk's xAI "to accelerate Department of Defense (DOD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges."
Last week, xAI garnered sweeping condemnation after Grok, the chatbot built into Musk's social media platform X—formerly known as Twitter—started spewing antisemitic content and calling itself "MechaHitler."
Meanwhile, Musk and Trump have been at odds since shortly after the richest man on Earth left the president's administration, in which he was the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk's involvement in the administration generated widespread concern, both because of DOGE's efforts to gut the federal government and because his various companies get so much money from federal contracts.
In a Monday statement about "Grok for Government," xAI not only confirmed the new DOD contract but also said that its products will be "available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to access xAI's frontier AI products."
The Trump administration's new money for Musk drew intense criticism on various platforms, including X—where Congresswoman Becca Balint (D-Vt.) wrote that "despite the social media wars, the Trump-Elon corruption machine is alive and well."
Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive Democrat running in Illinois' 9th Congressional District, said: "Stop entertaining this man. Stop giving him money. It's really that simple."
Abughazaleh also pointed to her past with Musk—she was laid off from the nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America as it faced financial strain from legal battles, including what the billionaire described as a "thermonuclear lawsuit."
"Elon Musk cost me my job, deposed me for being too mean to him online, and now he's responsible for tens of thousands of job losses while getting hundreds of millions of our tax dollars," she noted. "I'm running for Congress to stop men like him."
Nina Turner, a former progressive congressional candidate from Ohio, noted that "the Pentagon, which has failed seven straight audits, just gave $200,000,000 of our tax dollars to Elon Musk to use xAI. Meanwhile, funding for food banks [was] cut in the name of 'efficiency.'"
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular