Last week, three aldermen sponsored resolutions calling for hearings to flay Commonwealth Edison over power outages caused by a snowstorm that included 50-mile-an-hour winds. Let’s face it: the whole mess was what insurance companies refer to as “an act of God.”
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Cartoonish mishaps are so common at Com Ed nuclear plants, they might as well make Homer Simpson their poster boy. Just last week, Com Ed got hit with a $330,000 fine from the NRC for its Quad Cities plant–operators had started a reactor before running a required test to make sure its cooling system worked. In January, Com Ed announced it would permanently close its pathetic Zion plant, which had been shuttered since February 1997, when an operator accidentally shut down a reactor, then tried to restart it without telling anyone.
Com Ed placed last among the nation’s nine largest nuclear utilities in a report issued last November by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, an industry watchdog group.
The deregulation law lets government agencies negotiate discounts with Com Ed by consolidating their electricity bills. But when Chicago, its public schools, the CTA, and the Park District banded together to consolidate their $120 million annual bill, Com Ed would only cough up a measly 5 percent discount.
