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

He headquartered the project on an abandoned World War II naval air station 40 miles southeast of the Berkeley campus in what would later become the site of the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories, one of the largest developers of nuclear weaponry in the world. The contract for building the facility went to the California Research Group, the research-and-development arm of Socal. Socal promptly subcontracted the engineering and construction to Bechtel. 3

Work on MTA had scarcely gotten under way when in December 1949, the AEC called on Bechtel to build what would become an even more significant project: an experimental breeder reactor and chemical-processing plant at the agency ‘s Nuclear Reactor Test Station in the arid sage and lava plains 40 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. EBR-1, as it was called, was to test whether nuclear energy could be converted to electric power. The effort, said Lawrence R. Hafstad, director of the AEC’s Reactor Development Division, was “a daring adventure in nuclear science. “4

The adventure proved successful, giving Bechtel an important head start in what would soon be a headlong, high-stakes race to convert America to nuclear energy. The timing was most propitious. For just as EBR-1 went on line, Dwight Eisenhower took over at the White House. “My chief concern and y our first assignment,” he instructed his AEC chairman, Lewis Strauss, “is to find some new approach to the disarming of atomic energy. “5 Eisenhower expanded on the theme in an “Atoms for Peace” address delivered to the United Nations General Assembly less than a y ear later. “The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is one dream of the future,” the President declared. ” That capability, already proved, is here-now, today.” “Nuclear materials, he urged, should be used “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power starved areas of the world … The greatest destructive forces can be developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind. “6

The business of effecting that development fell to private industry.

Ignoring the counsel of Harry Truman that nuclear energy was “too important a development to be made the subject of profit-seeking,”

Eisenhower wanted the AEC to be able to issue licenses to private companies to build and operate nuclear power stations. In drawing up the Atomic Energy Act in 1954, the Republican-controlled Congress granted him his wish.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Wasting no time extending Bechtel’s lead, Steve flew to Washington, where McCone introduced him to AEC chairman Strauss, whom he had come to know when both men were working for the Department of Defense. Bechtel had his own friends at the AEC as well. One was W

Kenneth Davis, the agency’s director of reactor development, who, as Socal’s research director, had worked with Bechtel during the construction of the MTA. Three others, working out of the AEC’s West Coast office, were Harry Brown, Steven V W hite and Ashton O’Donnell.

Eventually, all four men would leave the agency and ultimately work for Bechtel, later prompting Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff to complain that the AEC had spawned an industry “so incestuous, it is impossible to tell where the public sector begins and the private one leaves off.”

W hile Bechtel was ingratiating himself at the AEC, he was also moving to enhance his standing with the utilities. Part of that task had already been accomplished. In 1951, at the invitation of the AEC, Bechtel and PG&E chairman James Black had formed a joint BechtelPG&E team