The "first company anywhere dedicated to building atomic reactors" (1), General Atomics (sic) was founded by Frederic de Hoffman, a former member of the Los Alamos team which constructed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (2). Later acquired by General Dynamics Corp, manufacturers of high-temperature gas-cooled (HTGR) reactors, nuclear fuels and nuclear steam systems, General Atomics was bought out by Gulf Oil in 1967 and renamed Gulf General Atomic Ltd (3). Somewhat later, half of Gulf's interests in the company was sold to Shell, but partially repurchased in 1979 (4). From 1980 until 1984, in the post-Three Mile Island era, General Atomic appears to have ended on the shelf, as it contended with complex litigation over Gulfs membership of the uranium cartel. During the previous decade it landed several contracts for reactors, for example with Delmarva Power and Light and Philadelphia Electric in the early '70s, and the Fort St Vrain HTGR station near Denver, Col, completed in 1972 (3) - though eight years later this station had still not reached full design power (5). The company also sold Indonesia its first reactor, a 250KW Triga Mark II which was operating at Bandung University in 1964. The reactor was upgraded to lMW in 1971 (6). Ironically, finance for the project derived from sale of Sumatran coal: one in the eye (or the bunker) for those who maintain nuclear power is always clean, while coal is always 'dirty' (7)!

In 1980, General Atomic offered to build a 25MW Triga in Indonesia - so far as is known, the offer was not taken up. If it were, this would have been the largest Triga built by the company anywhere (8).

During this period, General Atomic was also testing its Doublet III fusion reactor, with the support both of the US DoE and the electric utility industry in the States (5).

Gulf was the key US protagonist in the uranium cartel which effectively cornered the uranium market and quintupled uranium prices between 1972 and 1975. Since General Atomic was both a supplier of, and a contractor for, uranium during the '70s, it ended up (like Westinghouse) being sued by utilities and itself suing uranium mining companies which didn't deliver. (Unlike Westinghouse, however, there was never any doubt of Gulf's leading role in promoting the cartel.)

By late 1978, General Atomic was in the position of having to supply, to three utilities, uranium which it couldn't secure because its own supplier, the UNC, ceased deliveries while the cartel was being investigated by a Senate committee. The shortage - some 3,500,000 lbs of uranium oxide - was (fortunately for General Atomic) partly made up by supplies from the new Rabbit Lake mine, operated by Gulf's subsidiary Gulf Minerals Canada (9).

In mid-1984, General Atomic finally settled with UNC: it paid US$130M in cash to the other company and assumed UNC's obligations to repay some 2.3 million pounds of uranium owed by UNC to a utility. At the same time, Socal/Chevron agreed to invest US$100M in UNC through the purchase of unused stock (10).

As details of the cartel became public, General Atomic entered another dispute with a supplier - this time the Johnny "M" mine, jointly owned by Ranchers and HNG Oil. General Atomic originally agreed to purchase the output from the mine and filed suit against the other two companies when, in early 1976, they tried to revise or cancel their contracts because they couldn't deliver the full amount of ore. Ranchers and HNG countered with a claim that the contract had been unenforceable and should be therefore voided.

The litigation was partly settled the same year when Gulf States Utilities (the customer) accepted delivery of some uranium. Later the three companies agreed a profit-sharing arrangement which, it was estimated, would involve Rancher and HNG paying up to US$60M to General Atomic from around 1981 onwards (11).

By early 1984, Gulf had settled its final suit with the utilities, setting up a US$30M venture capital fund as part of a US$70M settlement with the TVA (12). Three years earlier it also agreed to pay the Pennsylvania Power and Light Co US$43.9M over seven years and supply it with 2.5M pounds U3Og until 1987 (13).

General Atomic's contribution to weapons programmes reared its ugly head in late 1989 in a (perhaps) surprising development, when the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced that it would be shipping 16.48 kg of 93% enriched (ie weapons grade) uranium to Romania, for use in a 14MW "research" reactor at Potesti one which had been supplied by General Atomic in the 1970s: the uranium had been manufactured by the company about ten years before (14).

Before his downfall, President Ceausescu of Romania had boasted that his country had the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons (14). The 1989 deal was arranged by Edlow Inc, whose Vice-President Rod Fisk, when asked whether he was concerned how the material would be used, retorted: "That's a question you have to address to the US government" (14).

SOURCE: "The Gulliver File - Mines, people and land: a global battleground" by Roger Moody.

Published in 1992 by Minewatch, 218 Liverpool Road, London Nl ILE, UK, and WISE-Glen Aplin, Po Box 87, Glen Aplin Q 4381, Australia.

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