"Newly found court documents from long ago are raising fresh questions about the safety of nuclear reactors made by General Electric."
"The documents reveal that General Electric had not fully tested its then brand-new nuclear reactor technology when it introduced its first reactor in Eureka, Calif., in 1958.
GE engineers soon figured out that the company’s reactors had a number of defects, but it would be many years before GE let the public in on the secret. The old court documents show that for the next 16 years, while the GE engineers busily worked on understanding the bugs in its nuclear-powered machines, GE kept on selling them to unsuspecting electric utilities around the world with the idea of fixing them later, placing the defective machines in the backyards of communities without their knowledge or consent -- a practice one federal judge later likened to a 'sophisticated form of Russian Roulette.'
One of those communities was Richland in South Central Washington state, about 150 miles east of Portland and Seattle. Another was Fukushima, Japan, where in 2011 the same bugs that worried the GE engineers a half-century before contributed to three reactor explosions."
Paul Koberstein and Robin Klein report for the Cascadia Times April 3, 2013.
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