LOS ANGELES, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Southern California Edison says its customers should pay a portion of the shut-down costs for the San Onofre nuclear power plant.
The company declared its position on the closure costs in a full-page letter published Monday in the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper reported.
The company said in early June that the plant would be mothballed permanently due to technical problems.
It had already been shut due to a radioactive leak in a steam generator system, the Times reported.
"If a utility asset must be retired before the end of its expected life, the utility recovers from customers its reasonable investment costs," Southern Edison's letter said.
"It [is] ... important to make sure our customers know about how the utility business works, and why there is such a thing as 'cost recovery,'" Southern Edison President Ron Litzinger said.
The company has 4.9 million customers and expects it will cost $4.1 billion to decommission the plant permanently.
That would mean the utility is short by about $500 million, as Southern Edison has $2.7 million set aside in a trust fund set up for decommissioning the power plant and two minority partners have set aside more than $925 million for the same purpose.
