Crisis of Conscience by Tom Mueller

Author:Tom Mueller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

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Of the many contractors in the nuclear power, weapons and cleanup business that dupe the US government, the DOE and the American taxpayer, Bechtel is the most experienced. What Walt Tamosaitis and Donna Busche saw the company do, and what the company did to them, it has done many times before in its storied history, at Hanford and elsewhere.

To see just how well established the routine of financialism, contract “nourishment” and whistleblower retaliation is at Bechtel, and how the three processes reinforce one another, let’s return to March 28, 1979, and America’s first major nuclear accident, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island. Bechtel was chosen to conduct the cleanup operation. At the time, Bechtel had been a powerhouse in Washington, DC, for decades, having built major railroads, pipelines, refineries and dams, and then Liberty ships during World War II. Its president, Stephen Bechtel Sr., and his close business ally John McCone played golf with Eisenhower during and after the war—their company would almost certainly have been one whose “unwarranted influence” over government he had in mind when he made his military-industrial-complex speech in 1961—and had pioneered the cost-plus contract. McCone, who later led the CIA, described their government contracts in a 1943 interview with Fortune magazine: “Every six months, we estimate how much work we expect to do in the next six months and then we get a fee of five percent of the estimated amount of work regardless of how much work we actually do turn out.”

After the war, the company continued with engineering megaprojects, now including nuclear reactors. By the time Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, Bechtel had begun securing major contracts with the recently created DOE to clean up the nation’s nuclear weapons sites. Reagan named former Bechtel managers to key positions in his cabinet: George Shultz, president of Bechtel, became secretary of state; Caspar Weinberger (he of the $640 toilet seat), Bechtel vice president and general counsel, was named secretary of defense; and W. Kenneth Davis, the company’s vice president for nuclear development, became deputy secretary of the DOE (and the de facto head of the department). Not surprisingly, Bechtel secured the $1.5 billion contract with the DOE to fix Three Mile Island. Two other organizations were present on the site—General Public Utilities, the operator of the plant, and the NRC, which was formally required to review and approve every phase of the cleanup—but Bechtel became the unquestioned leader of the project. Since the Three Mile Island disaster hurt the public image of civilian nuclear power, an industry that had become a major profit center for Bechtel, the company was determined to complete the cleanup as swiftly as possible.

Bechtel’s senior startup engineer on the site was Rick Parks, who began work at Three Mile Island in 1982. As with Donna Busche at Hanford forty years later, Parks’s job was to ensure that all work performed during the cleanup followed strict protocols prescribed by the NRC for the nuclear industry.

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