ROCKVILLE, Md. - A review panel has dismissed sanctions the government had taken against former Davis-Besse engineering supervisor David Geisen.

On a 2-1 vote, it said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to prove he intentionally deceived the commission when the plant's reactor head nearly burst in 2001.

The decision allows Geisen to begin seeking another job in the nuclear industry.

When the NRC issued an administrative order against him in early 2006, he was immediately terminated from his job at the Kewaunee nuclear plant 27 miles east of Green Bay, Wis. He also was banned from other agency-regulated activities for five years.

He appealed to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which oversees NRC actions.

Administrative Judges Michael C. Farrar and Nicholas G. Trikouros agreed with Geisen's lawyers that the commission did not have enough evidence against him "and thus failed to establish that he engaged in deliberate misconduct."

"Insofar as Mr. Geisen was concerned, we find that [FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.] submissions, although later stipulated to be false, were not contradictory to his then understanding of the relevant situation and information," the judges stated.

In his dissenting opinion, Administrative Judge E. Roy Hawkens said the sanctions were justified.

The cover-up has been described as one of the largest in U.S. nuclear history.

Acid that leaked through Davis-Besse's old reactor head burned a six-inch cavity into the massive steel lid. That exposed a thin stainless-steel liner, which started to bulge and crack. Had it burst, radioactive steam would have formed in containment of a U.S. nuclear vessel for the first time since the half-core meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979.

Geisen was one of four former Davis-Besse employees whom the NRC and the U.S. Department of Justice named as co-conspirators in early 2006.

Geisen and an engineer who worked for him, Andrew Siemaszko, were convicted at separate trials on three counts of withholding information in the fall of 2001.

The NRC has said the information was vital for it to assess while deciding whether to follow through with a shutdown order it had prepared for Davis-Besse. The order, which ultimately was not executed, was the agency's first of its kind since 1987.

Geisen and Siemaszko were fired from their Davis-Besse jobs in 2002. Mr. Geisen went to work for the Wisconsin nuclear plant on Jan. 15, 2003.

U.S. District Judge David Katz of Toledo fined Geisen $7,500 in 2008 and sentenced him to three years probation, 200 hours of community service, and four months of house arrest.

This year, he sentenced Siemaszko to three years of probation and fined him $4,500 for the criminal charges.

A third defendant, Rodney N. Cook, a Tennessee contractor, was acquitted of all charges against him. The fourth, former Davis-Besse engineer Prasoon Goyal of Toledo, was not prosecuted in exchange for his testimony against the other three.

FirstEnergy Corp., the plant's owner-operator, has paid a record $33.5 million in civil and criminal fines for its corporate role in the cover-up.

Contact Tom Henry at:

thenry@theblade.com

or 419-724-6079.

First Published August 29, 2009, 11:25 a.m.