THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

First Energy, noted Republican corporate donor and the folks who brought you the most recent Northeast blackout, has been fined $28 million for lying and covering up the failing condition of one of its nuclear reactors. As reported in the Toledo Blade:

FirstEnergy Corp.’s nuclear subsidiary will pay a record $28 million fine to avoid being criminally prosecuted for lying to the government about the dangerous condition of Davis-Besse’s old reactor head, U.S. Attorney Greg White said here yesterday.

The subsidiary, FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., gets 60 days to pay that amount. It must cooperate with the government in the prosecution of three former Davis-Besse employees who have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements to a federal agency.

The $28 million fine is in addition to a $5.45 million civil penalty from April, 2005, which the company already has paid.

The latter had been the largest fine ever imposed in U.S. nuclear history until yesterday.

Neither of those fines can legally be passed on to ratepayers, prosecutors said.

David M. Uhlmann, chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s environmental crimes section, said the $28 million fine is to let operators of America’s 104 nuclear plants know that the government will deal with them harshly if any of them are caught lying again.

“[FENOC] violated that duty and, as a consequence, they breached the public trust,” Mr. Uhlmann said.

But U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat who has called for FirstEnergy’s operating license at Davis-Besse to be revoked, said the fine was a “slap on the wrist” for a utility that “put the health and well-being on millions of residents of northern Ohio at grave risk.”

The congressman said in a prepared statement that a $28 million fine — as enormous as it sounds — still represents less than 1 percent of the utility’s 2004 profit.

That, he said, allows for “business as usual” at FirstEnergy.

Mr. Uhlmann said the company showed “brazen arrogance” by withholding information in the fall of 2001 when the NRC was debating internally whether Davis-Besse was too dangerous to keep operating past Dec. 31 of that year, he said.

Ultimately, senior NRC officials overrode a staff recommendation to shut down the plant immediately. They struck a compromise to let it keep operating until Feb. 16, 2002 — six weeks shy of its planned shutdown date of March 31, 2002.

The agency now says it would never have done that if it had known at the time that the plant’s old reactor head was on the verge of rupturing.

A rupture had the potential to affect at least 28 million people. So I guess now you know what you are worth. Still, it is a record fine, if they end up paying in full.