I didn't know that; I thought that the plant owners had given Mitsubishi the design to fabricate. Thanks.

At least so the WaPost reports the NRC official and power company as saying.

Damon Moglen, climate and energy director for green group Friends of the Earth, said that Southern California Edison made significant design changes to the plant without seeking an amendment to its existing license, as is required by the regulatory commission.

His group submitted petition to nuclear regulators on Monday to require the company to obtain a new license, complaining that in his view the commission was "asleep at the regulatory wheel."

The amount of renovation over the past decade involved in uprating and relicensing the plants is huge. If this is representative of the degree of oversight that has been applied during this process (and I see no reason to think it isn't) then the claim that our nuclear fleet is "safe" simply cannot be made.

can never be truly safe, ever. Under no circumstances can nuclear energy honestly be considered a safe or sane way to boil water to make steam to spin turbines to power generators to make our electricity.
It was an insane idea to begin with and its an insane idea now.
Just from this one incident alone, and there has been many other incidences where we narrowly dodged the bullet, we can deduce that there is a lot more potential catastrophes lurking in our other nuclear power plants. Its simply a matter of when not if. IMHO
All our plants are old with many already past their designed lifetime.

The exact same statement could be made about airliners. YES - the regulatory agency doesn't have someone looking over the shoulders of every airline mechanic to make sure the mechanic doesn't make a mistake. Yes - we have lost airliners because of mechanic's mistakes. Does that mean we toss airliner travel on the junkheap?

NO - we do our best to be sure it doesn't happen again. But you can never be 100% sure.

The NRC doesn't have people looking over every computer program and dissecting them to be sure there aren't any bugs. Every so often a mistake is made.

However, that doesn't mean that one becomes a "binary thinker" and draw FALSE conclusions. It is a FALSE conclusion to say that because the safety rate is not 100% that we can then conclude that the safety rate is 0% or 10% or some other low number.

The actual success rate could be 99.99999% but that is not 100%

Many of the design details of a large engineering project are left to the company that actually makes the hardware. A reactor operator like Southern California Edison may elect the option to have a larger number of tubes than the original generators to enhance reliability. The fabricator then designs how that specification is actually realized in hardware.

You are repeating the old LIE that nuclear power plants were designed to last only 40 years. That is WRONG. They were actually designed to last 80 to 100 years. The lawmakers are the ones that gave us a 40 year license with option to renew. The plants are NOT beyond some design lifetime.

Additionally, a reactor consists of the vessel and the internal core. The core parts are continually being replaced; so they don't really wear out. The vessel is subject to embrittlement by neutrons; but we discussed here in another thread how the vessel can be annealed. Electric energy is used to heat the steel until the dislocated atoms naturally fall back to their normal lattice positions ( metals are crystals ) and the damage is "healed".

Look how many old airplanes are still flying. At the recent Memorial Day holiday, the Collins Foundation came to our local airport with some of their World War II warbirds, that are still flying, and ALL of them are older than ANY nuclear power plant.

PamW

They shutdown that fucking SONGS bomb before it blew sky high.

Heard the backup generators weren't even ready to go to work. Man we got lucky.