Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

fuel, including plutonium, which could be used to power nuclear power plants and build H-bombs as well. It was a historic-and according to its critics, profoundly dangerous-decision; but at the time, the announcement did not receive much notice. Quietly, a Bechtel executive and former Atomic Energy Commission official named Ashton O’Donnell began drawing up marketing plans for a nuclearfuel development project. By early 1972, the plans were sufficiently advanced for O’Donnell to pay a sales call on the Japanese, who were expected to be major customers for enriched uranium fuel. Flying to Tokyo, O’Donnell met with officials from several Japanese utilities, along with executives from Union Carbide, which had already agreed to join Bechtel in producing and marketing the power-plant fuel. During several days of talks, the Japanese, Bechtel and Carbide committed themselves to jointly spending $6 million on a study that would lay out the whys, wherefores and details of a nuclear-enrichment plant.

In. Washington, meanwhile, Bechtef representatives we�e making a similar pitch to the administration, which, still reeling from the Arab oil “shocks,” did not require much persuading. All that remained, aside from getting the approval of Congress, was for the United States and Japan to sign a formal agreement. That, in turn, was accomplished, in July 1972, when Nixon, accompanied by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, flew to Honolulu for a two-day summit meeting at the Kuilima Hotel with Japan’s new 52-year-old prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka. Known by his admirers as the “computerized bulldozer,” Tanaka was no less enthusiastic about buying nuclear fuel than Nixon was in peddling it. Using the Bechtel-Union Carbide proposal as a basis for their discussion, Tanaka and Nixon drew up an agreement for a study to be made by the United States and Japan. The document that resulted was, almost word for word, identical with the O’Donnell paper. 1

In November, with presidential elections over and the study in hand, Nixon gave Bechtel and Union Carbide-and their Japanese partners

-tentative ��proval to build the world’s first privately owned nuclearfuel plant, a $5.7 billion facility at Dothan, Alabama. Financing for the plant, which was to be operated by Carbide and a specially created Bechtel subsidiary, Uranium Enrichment Associates (UEA), was to come largely from the federal government. When, the following June, Nixon provided Bechtel and six other members of the nuclear fraternity with access to the previously classified secrets of uranium-enrichment 198

NUCLEAR ECLIPSE

technology, The Wall Street Journal hailed the beginning of “what may be the largest commercial undertaking in history. “2

Bechtel was no less enthusiastic. Once the Dothan plant was built and private uranium enrichment a reality, the company could function as a veritable one-stop supermarket for the nuclear industry-not to mention the emerging countries that wanted one. As John A. Damm, UEA’s business-development manager, glowingly put it in a, letter to the Brazilian minister of mining and energy, the company’s product line would soon run “the gamut from the development of uranium mines, reprocessing, enrichment fuel processing … through the design of nuclear plants themselves. “3

The confident expectations began going awry when W Kenneth Davis, Bechtel’s vicepresident for nuclear development (and later, deputy secretary of Energy for Ronald Reagan) attended a nuclear-energy conference in Washington in September 1973. During a panel discussion, Davis was startled to hear Dr. Stephen Hanauer, an Atomic Energy Commission official, remark offhandedly that “there is likely to be a major nuclear disaster in the world, and the prime candidate is Tarapur.” Hanauer went on to charge that “the reactor suppliers and the architect engineer are acting irresponsibly and to the detriment of the best interests of the United States in that they’ve failed to