By Pam Sohn
A nuclear watchdog group is touting a memorandum sent by Bill Johnson — TVA’s soon-to-be new leader –as the smoking gun that should reopen the Duke-Progress energy merger that formed what is now the nation’s largest utility company.
Jim Warren, director of NC WARN in North Carolina, filed legal papers this week with the North Carolina Utilities Commission claiming that an April memo from Johnson to his Progress board shows he and Duke merger officials may have withheld information about the rising costs at the crippled Crystal River Nuclear Plant in Florida.
Those ballooning costs could have offset the public savings claimed for the utility merger, Warren said.
Johnson, now the incoming TVA president and CEO, was the former Progress CEO who served as the Duke CEO for one day before he was ousted at Duke.
