Feb. 1--A nuclear power plant employee indicted on suspicion of misleading federal regulators about the condition of a troubled Ohio plant later moved to Wisconsin, where he worked for the past three years at the Kewaunee nuclear plant.

David Geisen of De Pere is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in federal court in Toledo, Ohio, on five charges of falsifying reports to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He is one of three people who worked for the Davis-Besse nuclear plant who have been indicted on charges of filing reports that concealed problems at the plant outside Toledo.

Geisen was part of a group of Davis-Besse workers who left FirstEnergy in fall 2002 as part of management changes that resulted from an intensive NRC investigation of problems at the plant. A spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., which owns Davis-Besse, said he couldn't comment on the circumstances surrounding Geisen's departure from FirstEnergy.

Geisen was hired as nuclear oversight manager at the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in January 2003, said Arlene Datu, a spokeswoman for Hudson-based Nuclear Management Co.

Nuclear Management was formed more than five years ago to run nuclear plants in the upper Midwest, including the Kewaunee and Point Beach plants.

Geisen continued to work at Kewaunee after the reactor was sold in July to Dominion Resources Inc. of Richmond, Va. Joe Reid, a Dominion spokesman, said Geisen was barred from continuing to work at Kewaunee. The NRC on Jan. 4 imposed a five-year ban preventing Geisen from working in any reactor or other facility regulated by the commission.

Geisen's lawyer, Richard Hibey of Washington, D.C., said he will seek to have Geisen cleared of the charges in a jury trial.

"A fair-minded review of all of the evidence compels the conclusion that he did not knowingly make false statements to the NRC," Hibey said in an e-mailed statement.

While at Kewaunee, Geisen served first as manager of nuclear oversight until March 2005, when his job was changed, Datu said. That change took place during a prolonged shutdown of Kewaunee to address several safety concerns raised by regulators.

The Davis-Besse nuclear plant was shut down for two years after inspectors discovered a football-size hole inside the reactor's vessel head, or cover. Leaking boric acid had caused a hole, and a plant accident was barely averted.

The NRC and federal Justice Department indictment contend that Geisen, then Davis-Besse's engineering manager, and other workers at Davis-Besse gave incomplete, misleading and false information concerning the condition of the vessel head and the nozzles inside it, after NRC inspectors raised concerns that plants such as Davis- Besse might have leaks.

If that information had been disclosed earlier, the plant would have been shut down sooner, officials said.

After the plant was shut for refueling in February 2002, the hole inside the reactor vessel head was discovered -- a problem so severe that many nuclear experts have called the incident the nuclear industry's biggest near-miss since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

The indictment was filed on the same day that the Justice Department announced a settlement with Davis-Besse owner FirstEnergy Corp., which agreed to pay $28 million to settle charges against it. FirstEnergy also filed papers accusing its former employees of misleading regulators.

Other indicted former Davis-Besse workers, including both a plant employee and a contractor, entered not guilty pleas last week, and Geisen is expected to do the same today.

In a statement released after the indictment, Hibey said, "We will defend this case vigorously and fully expect that when that jury considers all the evidence, it will exonerate Mr. Geisen completely."

Hibey also said in the statement that "The allegation . . . that Mr. Geisen was involved in a 'scheme' to mislead the NRC and to hide significant safety issues in order to keep Davis-Besse open for an additional month and a half is unsupported by facts and contradicts logic."

The boric acid leaking problem in reactors such as Davis-Besse resulted in a more rigorous review of reactor vessel heads every time nuclear reactors of the same design, including Wisconsin's three operating reactors, were shut down for refueling.

To avoid the costs and extra time out of service associated with these reviews, the owners of both the Kewaunee and Point Beach nuclear plants have replaced their vessel heads in the last two years, at a cost of $72 million.