Engineer receives probation for role in Davis-Besse cover-up

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090207/NEWS02/902070406

Article published February 07, 2009
U.S. DISTRICT COURT

Engineer receives probation for role in Besse cover-up
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Former Davis-Besse engineer Andrew Siemaszko was sentenced Friday to three years probation and ordered to pay $4,500 in fines for his role in the Ottawa County nuclear plant's massive cover-up in the fall of 2001 that government prosecutors have called one of the most significant in the nation's nuclear history.

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FirstEnergy Corp., the nuclear plant's owner-operator, has paid a record $33.5 million in fines to settle civil and criminal probes that were undertaken after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was talked out of executing an emergency shutdown order it had prepared for Davis-Besse in the fall of 2001.

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A crisis was barely averted when the plant was shut down on Feb. 16, 2002, six weeks later than what the NRC had originally proposed.

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Siemaszko, described in the past by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other activist groups as a whistleblower whom the NRC and the nuclear industry used as a scapegoat, did not testify during his trial.

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