Brothers Fined $1.32 Million for Parts Scheme : Judgment: The award makes restitution to a nuclear plant that bought old circuit breakers labeled as new.

Two brothers whose San Fernando Valley businesses sold used circuit breakers labeled as new were ordered Monday to pay more than $1.3 million to cover the cost of temporarily closing an Arizona nuclear power plant while the electrical devices were removed.

Carlos Trevino, 39, of Rancho Santa Fe and Isidro Trevino, 37, of Granada Hills each were sentenced by U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall to serve three years probation, perform 100 hours of community service and pay a $5,000 fine.

They pleaded guilty in February to two felony counterfeiting charges for instructing their employees to label reconditioned, used circuit breakers as if they were new.

The components were purchased by several power plants but apparently only installed at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona, which supplies some electricity to Los Angeles.

The Palo Verde plant was shut down for more than 12 hours in October while the devices were replaced.

Circuit breakers are designed to shut off power automatically to prevent fires or short circuits, but at Palo Verde they were being used as manual on/off switches, according to Greg Cook, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Trevinos owned two companies--California Breakers of North Hollywood and ATS Circuit Breakers Inc. of Burbank--which are among six Southern California firms under investigation by the NRC and the U.S. attorney’s office.

Investigations of the other four firms is continuing, Cook said, and other sentences are anticipated.

According to wire reports, Carlos Trevino told the judge Monday that he and his brother were only following industry practice by relabeling the reconditioned circuit breakers to make them appear new.

But, he added: “Even though this was the industry practice, I realize this definitely was a problem. We’ve corrected it over the last 22 months.”

Cook disagreed with Trevino’s contention that the counterfeiting was standard practice, although he said it had “spread through a number of companies in the electrical wholesaling business.”

“But it’s one thing to recondition a breaker under very strict controls and to present it as such,” he said. “It’s another to pass it off as new.”

The $1.32-million restitution pays for labor costs incurred in closing the Palo Verde plant as well as for the plant’s expense of buying power from other sources during the closure to prevent electrical brown-outs and other complications, Cook said.

Because the breakers were being used as manual switches and were not expected to react automatically, Cook said, it was “relatively unlikely that there would have been a problem with them.”

NRC investigators became suspicious of the Trevinos’ components in 1988, when testing done at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant in San Luis Obispo found nearly all of their parts to be defective.

Concurrently, a manufacturer of new circuit breakers had inquired about the devices the Trevino brothers sold to the Diablo Canyon plant, because the price paid by the plant was below that charged by the manufacturer.