Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

The Tarapur to which Hanauer referred was a nuclear plant in India, located on the Arabian Sea, some 60 miles north of Bombay. It was the first major commercial atomic power station in India, the largest nuclear facility in Asia and a showcase for exporting nuclear technology to developing nations. All of which would have been cause for alarm. But there was one fact more: Tarapur had been built by Bechtel.

Still disbelieving what he had heard, Davis accosted Hanauer afterward to ask if it was true, and in reply, received another jolt. Not only was it true, Hanauer told him: the situation was, if any thing, even worse than he had described. Recently, he recounted, an AEC official named Clifford Beck had visited Tarapur and, among other horrors, found Indian laborers perched above the plant’s “radwaste ” facility, trying to disperse radioactive debris with long bamboo poles. So ineffective was Tarapur’s waste-disposal procedure, Hanauer went on, that extremely high levels of radioactivity had been found in the nearby waters of the Arabian Sea. This in turn had led the Indian government recently to ban all fishing in the area, which traditionally supplied fish 199

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

and mollusks to the markets of Bombay. Moreover, according to Hanauer, Beck had also found large quantities of radioactive material and drums of radioactive waste, many of them open, strewn around the plant like uncollected garbage. Under existing conditions, Hanauer quoted Beck as saying, Tarapur was a disaster waiting to happen.

Davis hurried back to San Francisco and apprised his superiors of what he had heard, adding a recommendation that Bechtel talk to Beck, as Davis put it, “to find out how much of what Steve [Hanauer]

said was exaggeration and how much is true . “5 Bechtel did talk to Beck, who confirmed everything Hanauer had said. Now truly worried, the company immediately dispatched one of its senior nuclear engineers, John G. Walker, to inspect Tarapur personally.

On arrival in Bombay, Walker spent several days conferring with Indian officials and also with executives of General· Electric, the supplier of Tarapur’s reactor. He then traveled to Tarapur, where his findings essentially confirmed those of Beck. 6 As Beck had observed, the radwaste facility wasn’t functioning properly, primarily because the amount of waste being processed, some 50,000 gallons per day, was more than the system’s capacity. In addition, Walker discovered that the plant’s complex network of pipes, valves, pumps and condensers was leaking like a large and extremely dangerous sieve. One area alone, the so-called drywell section of the plant, was experiencing the leakage of between 3,000 and 4,000 gallons a day of radioactive fuel. As a result, Walker told company officials when he returned to San Francisco, “all of the personnel directly involved in the plant’s operations (more than 500 employees)” had received “a large radiation dose.” The same, he added, was true of many of the hundreds of temporary workers employed by the plant, including local natives who were hired as “valve twisters.” Summarizing the growing health risks, Walker noted that in 1969, 399 Tarapur workers had received “substantial exposure” to radiation; a year after that, the number had grown to 5 50, and was on its way to a total of 1, 500 workers by the end of 1972. Nor was that all. During one recent incident, a refueling outage that had occurred in May 1973,