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

the Atomic Age, when in the early 1940s, Bechtel, through its connections with General Somervell, had built several “heavy water” storage plants at Hanford, Washington, as part of the Manhattan Project-the program that developed the atomic bomb. Later, after the bomb had proved its destructive potential at Hiroshima, Bechtel had been one of several contractors and utilities that had built the “Doomsday Town” in the middle of the Nevada desert. Complete with model homes, electric lines and its own power plant, the town had been erected so that the AEC and major utilities could assess what would happen if a small nuclear device were detonated in the midst of a typical middle-sized American city. Would, for instance, the power keep running in, say, Memphis or Indianapolis? The companies got their answer at 5:10

A.M., on a mid-October morning in 1952, when, as one witness recounted, “the switch was tossed and the soft pearly dawn of the desert 101

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went white and orange.” Sad for Memphis and Indianapolis, the Doomsday Town was leveled.

For Bechtel, the Doomsday study was one of a series of early projects the company carried out for the AEC in conjunction with a number of its energy-minded customers like PG&E. It was work that in the coming years would do much to define the emerging nuclear industry. Not coincidentally, it would also establish the Bechtel Corporation as the world’s largest purveyor of nuclear power.

Bechtel had already gained a foothold in the rapidly expanding power industry through his connections with California utilities, for which he had built-and would continue to build-a number of highly profitable steam and hydroelectric plants. He was eager to extend that business to other utilities across the country; “going nuclear,”

he calculated, was the way to do it. “Nuclear power was a mechanism for getting Bechtel into the power-plant business,” said a senior Bechtel executive. For Steve, “it was a considered move. “1

Other Californians were making similar calculations. James Black of PG&E was on the verge of committing his company to nuclear power, while Henry Kaiser had already gotten into the game in typically highrolling fashion by securing a $110 million contract for Kaiser engineers to modernize and expand the Hanford facilities. Meanwhile, Cal Tech and Bechtel and McCone’s alma mater, Berkeley, were in the process of supplanting Eastern universities as important centers of atomic research. Almost overnight, it appeared, the West Coast was becoming a hotbed of nuclear development.

At the center of much of this activity was Ernest 0. Lawrence, a Berkeley scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and who, after the war, had been a principal supporter of Edward Teller’s proposal to build what was then called “The Super” and later became more familiarly known as the hydrogen bomb. In October 1949 the AEC temporarily put off building the weapon, but awarded Lawrence and his colleagues at Berkeley a contract to build a top-secret project with the cover name “Materials Testing Accelerator. “2

Lawrence had a lifelong obsession with building big machines, and this one more than fulfilled it. Nearly 4,000 feet in length and employing giant magnets and thousands of tons of steel, the MTA was designed to be a kind of massive nuclear oven, wherein uranium was bombarded with neutrons to create fissionable plutonium-the explosive “stuff’ of H-bombs. Even with uranium from the Belgian Congo quickly being depleted and the AEC as yet unaware of the great store 102

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that lay in western Colorado