Bechtel's Nuclear Nightmares

[Author's Note: In April of this year, the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation won a $68 million contract to rebuild Iraq following the devastation wrought by the US invasion. Bechtel is notorious for having friends in high places, perhaps explaning how they got the contract in the first place. The privately owned corporation has operated with impunity, whether siphoning off millions of taxpayer dollars from government contracts or poisoning the communities surrounding their ventures. In the second part of our series we look at the enviromental and human right impacts of just a few of Bechtel's operations.]

San Onofre, California, has a 950-ton radioactive problem: a nuclear reactor built by Bechtel that nobody wants. The unit was shut down over a decade ago in 1992 by its owners, Southern California Edison, who preferred not to spend $125 million in required safety upgrades.

The only place that will accept the reactor is a dump in South Carolina but railway officials refused to transport the cargo across the country. The next suggestion was to ship it via the Panama Canal but the canal operators said no. So did the government of Chile when the power plant owners asked for permission to take it around the Cape of Good Hope.

The only option left is to ship it all the way around the world, although even that is looking unlikely as harbor officials in Charleston, South Carolina, are already suggesting that they may deny the reactor entry. Edison officials are currently desperately looking for a port that might accept the toxic cargo before the dump shuts its doors in 2008.

Part of a Pattern

This is not the only nuclear headache created by Bechtel. The company estimates that it has built 40 percent of the United States' nuclear capacity and 50 percent of nuclear power plants in the developing world. That accounts for 1,200 reactor years at 150 nuclear power plants. Indeed, Bechtel is still building nuclear reactors, including the 1,450 megawatt installation in Qinshan, China.

In fact, the world's first nuclear reactor to generate electrical power was completed just over 50 years ago by a team of Bechtel engineers in the sagebrush desert of southeastern Idaho under contract to the federal government. The 100-kilowatt EBR-1 was completed on December 21, 1951, ushering in the dawn of commercial nuclear power. Bechtel was quick to capitalize on its newfound nuclear expertise.

"Nobody doubted that nuclear energy could work. The real question was, could anyone make a profit in it?" recall the authors of "Bechtel: Building a Century," the coffee table book that the company produced to mark the company's 100th anniversary in 1998.

The question is deeply ironic for ratepayers in California who are still paying for the financial bills and the environmental costs of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which has two reactors that are still generating power.

Environmental Perils

The local environmental costs continue to mount every day as the plant sucks in huge quantities of plankton, fish and even seals with the water to cool the reactors. It is destroying miles of kelp on the seabed by discharging water that is 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than ocean temperature, according to Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club's coastal program.

"It's an unequivocal environmental and economic disaster with no redeeming features whatsoever," Massara noted.

And Don May, the president of California Earth Corp, who has been fighting the plants since the 1960s, says that the future cost could be much higher because there is a major fault line about two miles away that is overdue for an earthquake. What worries him most is the fact that Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.

"The way the reactor has been installed at the site means that the seismic braces will exacerbate the impact of an earthquake rather than reduce it. In addition the reactor walls have been worn down to half their original thickness from constant bombardment." May explained. "If there is an earthquake, Lord help us."