Bechtel Fox in the Nuclear Henhouse

The news today that the federal government had awarded the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the UC-Bechtel team should give us all pause.

After all, as CorpWatch noted when Bechtel was amassing huge no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq (see "Profiting From Destruction"), the company's record with nukes is not exactly sparkling:

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. [...]

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. [...]

Several former employees at the plant who have
developed cancer have also sued Bechtel and plant owner Southern
California Edison for exposure to radiation. It's a story that has
become depressingly familiar for dozens of communities living downwind
from nuclear plants that are seeing alarming increases in cancer.

Bechtel was also the contractor responsible for the biggest construction boondoggle in American history: Boston's Big Dig. Errors by Bechtel in planning and execution lead to massive cost overruns. As the Boston Globe observed at the time, "Yet, even as Bechtel's errors helped drive up the Big Dig's cost, the
company never paid for any of its mistakes. Instead, it profited."

Is this really the kind of company we want watching over the most sensitive and dangerous of projects?

While the award of the Los Alamos contract to UC and Bechtel surprised some, the company's long record of coziness with those in high government places even outpaces its rival for the contract, Lockheed Martin (which was to partner with the University of Texas to run the lab).

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• 124 War & Disaster Profiteering