While much of America enjoyed an extended holiday, it wasn’t a seamless weekend for everyone in the region. San Diego CityBeat notes that at the San Onofre Nuclear Station, 70 gallons of sulfuric acid were spilled — the fifth spill in just over two years. As CityBeat notes, there was a hydrazine spill in February 2011 (“Hydrazine is highly toxic and dangerously unstable”), and two much worse spills of sulfuric acid — two spills in the same July 2010 day, and another spill in April of 2009.

The spill comes one month to the day after hundreds of locals attended a public meeting to voice concerns about safety at San Onofre, where an on-site safety inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the crowd that despite limited progress recently, “San Onofre is the leader still in safety concerns reported to the NRC.”

In March, NRC inspectors defended a long record of safety concerns at San Onofre including “a deficient “safety culture'” and an environment allegedly hostile to raising safety concerns. In the same month a manager with Southern California Edison, which owns nearly 80% of the facility, sued the company. He alleges that “he was fired for reporting safety concerns at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.“

In fact, new information from Japan finds that the Fukushima plant failed before the tsunami hit, meaning that the plant was designed to withstand a major earthquake and didn’t. Meanwhile, the NRC found that many domestic nuclear facilities are currently vulnerable to a wide range of natural disasters, including earthquakes.

An environment that is at best disinterested and at worst hostile to safety, a long and consistent record of safety violations, and new concerns that our domestic nuclear facilities may not be nearly as safe as we originally thought — it’s a recipe for disaster.

The San Onofre facility is in Darrell Issa’s district, so he has a particular vested interest in its safety. After all, it’s his constituents that are first in line if the worst should happen. And San Onofre’s safety record is troubling on a number of levels, including a clear and ongoing record of safety problems and potentially a culture that discourages employees from reporting safety problems.

But so far, Issa hasn’t shown much interest in pursuing nuclear safety. Maybe it’s because Edison International, which owns nearly 80% of the plant through SCE, is Issa’s third largest career campaign contributor. Issa has been supported by Edison’s PAC to the tune of $46,000 over his career, including $5,500 last cycle. That doesn’t include an additional $10,000 to Issa’s two PACs.

In fact, Darrell Issa has been an active impediment to safety reviews of domestic nuclear facilities. In the immediate aftermath of the terrible nuclear disaster in Japan, Issa called for questions into nuclear safety. But he hasn’t since asked them. Instead, Issa has pursued an investigation that began the same day as the disaster in Japan: demanding that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission produce a wide range of documents regarding the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump or face subpoena. And more recently, demanding to know why the NRC evacuated a wider area than the Japanese government around the Fukushima meltdown. This as the NRC was reacting in the aftermath of the Japanese nuclear disaster and conducting a full safety review of domestic nuclear facilities.

Just a month ago, hundreds of local residents came out to voice their concerns about the abysmal safety record at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Meanwhile, Darrell Issa is threatening the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with unrelated subpoenas while staying silent about nuclear safety. The most obvious explanation is that he’s defending the interests of a major campaign contributor who is responsible for the safety and operation at San Onofre. With the lives of thousands of Issa’s constituents at risk, even the appearance of bias in favor of his corporate backers is too much. It’s high time that Darrell Issa — the most powerful investigator in Washington — stand up for the basic safety of his district.

I proudly manage the Issa Watch program for the Courage Campaign where this was originally posted. You can follow on Facebook and Twitter.