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

the accident, the company should be scaling back its nuclear plans, not expanding them. No one, however, was willing to challenge him. “Junior managed by counterpunch,” said a Bechtel official. “He’d listen to what you said and then take your block off if he didn’t like what he’d heard. After Three Mile Island, interveners were shutting down nuclear plants left and right, but Steve wanted us to return to the wondrous days of yesteryear when nuclear power was in its glory. Nobody was going to tell him that we shouldn’t be riding off into the sunset shouting a hearty ‘Hi-Ho Silver.‘“10

Mounting up, Bechtel, on May 20, 1979, summoned to San Francisco the representatives of thirteen of the country’s leading nuclear suppliers and utilities whom he had chosen to play the role of Tonto.

Their job, as Bechtel Power president Harry Reinsch explained it to them, was to form a lobbying group-the United States Committee for Energy Awareness-and through it, pressure Congress for a renewed commitment to nuclear power. In addition, USCEA was to mount a $40 milliona-year advertising campaign - a campaign that would be financed by the utilities through rate hikes-aimed at relieving public concern about the dangers of nuclear power. According to a memorandum prepared by a Bechtel staffer, the campaign was to stress four main themes: that “the nuclear industry is making an all-out effort 224

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to increase nuclear safety as a result of the lessons learned at Three Mile Island”; that “the nation cannot meet the growing demand for electricity if it abandons nuclear energy”; that people will “suffer economically and environmentally if [the United States] abandons nuclear energy” and that the nuclear industry was trying to find “ways to minimize potential exposure to radiation and to develop acceptable ways to transport and store the nuclear waste. “11

At Reinsch’s suggestion, each of those present at the meeting secured from his company an initial $100,000 to get the campaign off the ground. A few weeks later, they saw the first result of their contributions in a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, featuring an ominous prediction by Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.12 Referring to the protests triggered by the Three Mile Island accident, Teller declared, “I believe we have reached a turning point in history. The antinuclear propaganda we are hearing puts democracy to a severe test. Unless the political trend toward energy development in this country changes rapidly, there will not be a United States of America in the twenty-first century.”

The ad, and the ones that followed it, found at least one believer, and a most important one: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan had been an outspoken proponent of nuclear power ever since his days as a spokesman and speech-giver for General Electric, the nation’s foremost builder of reactors. He reemphasized his commitment shortly after his election as president. “I believe in nuclear power,” Reagan declared at a news conference, announcing his intention to speed along the government’s nuclear licensing procedures.

“And I think it has been unnecessarily obstructed by some antinuclear-power activists. We think that by changing some cumbersome and useless regulations… and in removing those obstacles that enable activists to interfere… we can encourage continued development of nuclear power. “13

The man Reagan charged to carry out that task was W Kenneth Davis, a former AEC official