657 Westinghouse Corp Kirby, Danforth, Franklin, Gookin, Doctor Hornig, J.F. McGillicuddy and all ... what would they be doing sitting round a table on a sunny afternoon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1)? Since they are some of the directors of the world's biggest vendor (in the early '80s) of nuclear reactors, the US's fourteenth largest defence contractor (as of 1981) (2), the 75th largest multinational in the world (with 13% of its sales overseas) (1), a major exploiter of uranium (through Wyoming Mineral Corp), and an entity whose diversification has gone on for more than fifty years, they could as well be planning an adaptation of the cruise missile, a modification of launch tubes for the Trident or Poseidon submarine (3), how to sell 7-up (for which they own the franchise) (1) to the Marshall Islanders, how to promote Linguaphone (purchased in 1972) (1) among Filipinos who don't know the English for rip of as how to introduce cable TV to the "Lapps" (in 1981 they bought the Teleprompter Corp for the pittance of US$646M) (4).
Westinghouse began life as the Chartiers Improvement Co in 1872, later becoming the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co - its present name was adopted in 1945. In its quest to switch on the world (or at least the "civilised" part of it) Westinghouse expanded rapidly, especially in Britain (where its assets were later acquired by General Electric Co (GEC) - not to be confused with General Electric (GE) of the USA).
Diversifications over the next thirty years brought the company interests in elevators (sold to Finnish interests in 1975), electrical appliances, X-rays, electronics, watches (Longines), a record club, water pollution control, low income housebuilding. The last three were among the loss-making subsidiaries sold in a major "surgery" in the mid-'70s, when heavy re-investment was made in its central electrical and nuclear power businesses (and its equity stake in Westinghouse Canada raised to 93%) (1).
Westinghouse is not only the originator of the world's most popular (and, many would say, most disastrous) nuclear reactor, the PWR (Pressurised Water Reactor), it also built the first nuclear reactor for electrical purposes. But even at the dawn of commercial nuclear power, and in the wake of Eisenhower's famous 1953 "Atoms For Peace" pronouncement in the United Nations, the military-civil links were firmly intertwined. Westinghouse's first PWR was constructed for the US Navy's Nautilus submarine (5).
This wasn't the company's first excursion into the military nuclear field: in the war years its laboratory had been trying to separate U-235 from U-238. But whereas that hadn't proved successful (nor were Westinghouse's later ventures into uranium enrichment to yield much fruit, including a proposal made with Bechtel and GE to use the Purari River in Papua New Guinea to power a U-235 plant) (6), Westinghouse's enrolment by Admiral Rickover, to be his "malleable implement" for a nuclear task force, certainly was. Westinghouse also got the order to build (entirely at the government's expense) the first US "civil" reactor at Shippingport on the Ohio River. Though its electricity costs were ten times that of coal, it came on stream in only just over three years in 1958 (7). From these days onwards, Westinghouse was to be in competition with GE, not only for domestic orders but for the overseas sales which - especially when nuclear power slumped in the '70s - were the life-blood of the two colossi. The former was known as the "engineers" company', while GE gained a reputation for flair and innovation (7).
By the end of the '50s, Westinghouse had sold one PWR each to Belgium and Italy. Ten years later, twenty-one PWRs were operating in the USA, and a dozen were planned in Europe, India and Japan: GE and Westinghouse more or less split the sales between them (7).
At this point Westinghouse decided to "beef up" its image, and by 1970 it got the edge over its rival in reactor sales. In 1970 it flogged six reactors to Japan (and so did GE) (7).
Westinghouse's reactor for Brazil, Angra dos Reis No. 1 (succeeding reactors were to be constructed by Kraftwerk-Union of West Germany) (3), was the country's first nuclear contract. Construction began in 1971 at Itaorna Beach ("bay of bad stones") - one of the main geological fault areas in the country (8). Over a period of ten years, there were fires (including one which caused US$8M of damage) (9), movement in the building which put the turbogenerators out of joint, vibrations which ruined the building during tests, and appalling working conditions leading to epidemics of tuberculosis and other diseases (10). Since March 1983 the station has "repeatedly broken down, to the great embarrassment of Westinghouse and the mounting fury of the Brazilian government" (21).
Taiwan's vaunted nuclear power programme the biggest in the "developing world" - has mainly depended for its reactors on GE. But Westinghouse supplied the generators for GE's four plants and GE supplied them for Manshaan 1 and Manshaan 2, which were built by Westinghouse (10).
South Korea's first commercial reactor was built by Westinghouse and came on stream in 1978. There are 3 million people living within 32km of the plant, as well as 18 US military bases (11). The reactor was closed down no fewer than four times in a two- month period in Spring 1979 (12), and again in 1980 due to a leak in the turbine generator (13). Three more Westinghouse reactors are planned on the same site, and another two are being built on the south-east coast. Westinghouse's partner in the huge project is Kepco. The whole boondoggle was financed by the Exim bank, whose US$ 1.1 billion package was the biggest credit ever authorised by the bank (14).
Westinghouse also set up a factory with the local conglomerate Hyunai to manufacture nuclear power plants (15). A South Korean official testified at a US House Subcommittee investigation in the '70s that an internal commission had "voted unanimously to proceed with the development of nuclear weapons" (5).
Two of India's early small reactors were Westinghouse PWRs, sited at Tarapur (5).
Westinghouse has been a heavy investor in the apartheid economy (16), a large part of it through Framatome (before Giscard d'Estaing's government in France substituted gas-cooled reactors for PWRs and Westinghouse pulled out of Framatome) (5) (and see below). In 1984 it withdrew from a JV with Sasol, the manufacturer of coal-into-oil plants, which would have necessitated it supplying both parts and technology for a new coal gasification scheme. The company said the withdrawal was for "economic", not political reasons (17).
When nuclear power station construction began to slow down in the mid-'70s, naturally so did Westinghouse's overseas orders. Just before the Three Mile Island debacle, in the space of just 48 hours it lost a US$2.5 billion order to construct off-shore plants for Public Service Electric and Gas Co of New Jersey - and won a US$171M order to build two steam-supply systems for Commonwealth Edison (18).
Since then it has not fared so well. Apart from huge losses in 1979, thanks to settlements in the uranium cartel suits, it lost its stake in Framatome (19) and overseas orders were distinctly lacking. A bid to sell Egypt nuclear reactors in 1983 (20) looked like foundering in the face of more favourable terms offered by a French-Italian consortium (21).
In 1981/82 the company's electric lamp business was bought by Philips of the Netherlands for around US$200M (1).
However, its sales of other nuclear power equipment and its military sales (23), its new markets in broadcasting and cable TV (24), and a new venture with Warner Communications and American Express in cable TV (25), as well as its massive Teleprompter acquisition (26) kept it in profit: a "mere" US$448M in 1981 (26).
During this period Westinghouse's biggest problem was what has become known as the "cartel case". In 1975, the company announced that it would renege on past contracts which guaranteed uranium supplies at fixed prices as an incentive to buy the Westinghouse reactor package. Some 80 million pounds of uranium had been contracted to 27 utilities in the US and Sweden during the late '60s and early '70s (7) at US$9.50 a pound. By the mid-'70s the price of uranium shot up to around US$40 a pound, and with only some 20% of the contracted uranium supplied, Westinghouse was faced with a loss of US$2 billion in buying the shortfall. A company consultant at the time admitted that "the uranium thing [was] the most stupid performance in the history of American commercial life" (27).
Using the excuse of"commercial impracticability" (7) Westinghouse dumped on its customers, and was accordingly sued for breach of contract. As litigation costs mounted, making the suit the most expensive private litigation of all time (7), a deus ex machina appeared on the scene in the shape of documents filched from Mary Kathleen Uranium, which showed that RTZ, along with other major uranium producers, initially outside the USA, had formed a cartel to grab markets and push up prices sixfold during the years 1972/75 (28). On the basis of this information, Westinghouse proceeded to sue its erstwhile comrades in the uranium business. One of the ironies of the case was that Westinghouse itself had been indicted in 1961 for price-rigging, along with GE, its rival in the field of electricity manufacture, and for the first time in US history company executives from both companies had gone to jail (7).
And again, only a short time before the news of the cartel broke, Westinghouse was admitting to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that its subsidiaries had been making "questionable payments" to foreign officials, including a lump sum of US$ 150,000, apparently destined for just one foreign official (29).
By 1981 Westinghouse had settled its suits with the utilities starting with Texas Utilities in 1977 (30), moving through Statens Vattenfallsverk of Sweden (31), Virginia Electric and Power (32), Florida Power and Light (33), and Northeast Utilities (34), and ending with Gulf Oil in 1981. Here was another irony- for it was Gulf which proved one of the prime movers in the cartel conspiracy, since Westinghouse stood in direct competition to its reactor manufacturing subsidiary General Atomic (7). The cost at the end of the day to Westinghouse was around US$250M, though much of the settlement was in terms of uranium to be delivered in renegotiated contracts.
Another prime participant in the uranium cartel was the French CEA. CEA owns half of Framatome, an early (1972) partner of Westinghouse's, which held an initial 45% in the consortium (19). Westinghouse's stake in Framatome was reduced to 15% in return for half a million pounds of uranium (16) and, in 1982, the agreement was formally ended. Framatome was now able to export its PWR reactors to any country it wished, without prior US government authorisation (35), and could license the sale of Westinghouse PWRs to anyone it wanted. In practice, co-operation between the two companies continued (36).
Whatever the company's recent diversification into non-nuclear fields, we should not underestimate its continuing importance as a nuclear contractor, provider of components and of materials. For example, it proposed a link-up with Mitsubishi to produce titanium and zirconium (crucial in nuclear plants and high-speed aircraft) (37).
It holds important residual interests in both solar energy and fast breeder reactors.
In 1975, at a senate hearing on Small Business, one of the testifiers, Jim Piper, a small California solar contractor, was asked by the committee why the large energy corporations shouldn't be trusted with the nation's solar energy programme. He gave this lucid reason: "The larger corporations have vested interests right now in maintaining the status quo. If Westinghouse or GE came up with a usable solar system, immediately it would harm their profitability in other areas. Westinghouse just submitted a proposal to the FEA for US$ 1.75 billion for three atomic generating plants. If there was a dramatic increase in solar energy systems, and a lowering of the need for electrical energy in the future, it's possible that they might not be able to sell those three plants for US$1.75 billion. And that has got to be in the mind of the man from Westinghouse who decides whether to support solar systems or not. There is just not the profit, nowhere near it, in solar technology and equipment. It is just not there" (22).
Along with GE and Rockwell, Westinghouse has led the development of Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs). Until 1971 it paid for most of its own research work, then gained a permanent position in the early '70s - having spent US$40M by the end of the decade - at which point the US government moved in to foot 80% of the bill (22).
While most of Westinghouse's uranium activities have been undertaken through its subsidiary Wyoming Mineral, there are instances where Westinghouse has prospected on its own account.
It was reported actively exploring for uranium in northern Saskatchewan in the early '80s (though this may have been in the name of Wyoming Mineral).
In late 1984 it transferred its Lamprecht uranium mine to Intercontinental Energy with Westinghouse paying an initial US$600,000 and arranging to pay US$ 1.2M over the period 1990-2000 to cover clean-up costs. Substantial ore reserves were held at the mine which was adjacent to Intercontinental's Zamzow mine in Three Rivers, Texas (40). In the early '70s, Mitsubishi Metal Corp and Mitsubishi Corp formed the Taihei Uranium Exploration Corporation, to develop an integrated uranium business from mining to marketing, which enlisted Westinghouse in its plans to hunt for yellowcake in the Northern Territory of Australia (41).
Although Westinghouse had no known uranium exploration projects south of Texas, its equipment was used by various (mainly US) corporations during the early '70s in Project Radam - a US$7M aerial photographic survey of the Amazon region of Brazil. In the course of the survey, uranium deposits were discovered around Surucucu Mountain in the indigenous territory of Roraima (mainly occupied by Yanomami people) in 1975. A few months later Brazil signed the world's biggest "civil" nuclear pact with West Germany: a pact which included supplies of uranium from Yanomami land. Construction of the Northern Perimeter Highway- up to then the biggest single encroachment on indigenous territory in the Amazon - was partly undertaken to transport minerals, including uranium, from the newly discovered fields (42). However, no known exploitation of uranium - as distinct from gold and other metals - has taken place in the meantime.
Westinghouse, as such, has no known uranium projects on Indian land in the USA, but it has been one of the key links in propagating the huge Four Corners "development" which has afflicted the Navajo, Hopi, Laguna, Ute, Jicarillo, Apache and other nations with the largest single planned example of energy aggression of any region in contemporary times. Many other companies indexed in this File have been involved in this project, including Arco, Consolidation Coal, Peabody, Utah International, Exxon and Kerr-McGee (43).
The Four Corners Regional Development Project in the late '6Os called for a major urban centre which would not only bring in a huge influx of outsiders, but assimilate the Native American inhabitants in an unprecedented fashion. Although the project appears to have fallen on sterile ground, it is worth outlining the objectives to which Westinghouse gave its expertise, with "urban renewal" funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"Covering 288,000 square miles - about 8% of America's land area - the program for the Four Corners Economic Development is to include: an ultra-modern city of 250,000 with the latest techniques in housing prefabrication, education and business; a variety of recreational areas, including ski resorts, tourist ranches, and Indian villages and archeological ruins; a network of new roads and airports that would convert one of the most inaccessible areas of the US into a. center of commerce and tourism; agricultural projects to make more abundant use of land that is now mainly devoted to agriculture and sparse grazing. The work would cost a total of more than a billion dollars in both public and private funds. Indians would compose a minority of this urban population" (44).
"The study goes on to state - in the language of the corporate 'planners' who impose their visions of future development on our lives - that the major urban center could exist alongside the Native Americans and Chicanos in the area 'retaining existing cultural and aesthetic values' (45). If the Hopi and Navajo are displaced from their agricultural and grazing lands, they'll be able to buy their food at the ultra-modern shopping center, conveniently located across the street from their hogans" (43).
The corporation's most controversial uranium project in recent years has been a JV with the despotic neo-colonialist regime of Hassan II of Morocco to exploit both the country's phosphate deposits and those in the Western Sahara which the Moroccan army blatantly colonised in 1975, after Spain withdrew. Morocco is the world's largest exporter of phosphate rock (17.7 million tons in 1982) (47). Ever since the world's biggest deposit of the mineral was discovered at Bou Craa in the Western Sahara (Saharawi Democratic Arab Republic) in 1963, Morocco had itched for an excuse to take it over. Spain retained a 35% interest in Bou Craa after Morocco's annexation of the territory.
Already deeply involved in uranium-from-phosphates extraction in Florida (see Wyoming Mineral), Westinghouse - along with Gardinier and IMC (48) - offered to sell an unspecified amount of its uranium extracting technology to Hassan's regime in 1980. Since Westinghouse in 1977 obtained a US$200M contract to construct a Tactical Air Defence System for the despotic monarchy, the company was optimistic about success (49). It has had to wait longer than expected. The liberation movement, Polisario, closed down the Bou Craa mine soon afterwards, but it reopened and resumed production in mid-1982 (50). In early 1984, Westinghouse was confident that it was "first in line" to build Morocco's own extraction plant and it agreed to buy most of the oxides produced by that plant (51).
The greatest controversy in which the corporation has been involved in recent years remains that centred on its contract to supply a reactor to the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, with which to supply power to the Bataan free trade zone, at the expense of the fisherpeople, villagers and barrio dwellers of Morong.
Built on an earthquake fault, catering to the needs of exporters at the expense of local people, necessitating pay-offs to corrupt officials (the Disini connection) (10), financed by huge foreign loans, based on questionable technology - to say the least (52), the Westinghouse Bataan reactor epitomises most of what is unacceptable, dangerous, and downright deceptive, about nuclear power.
One of the people of the barrios sent a letter to the outside world, soon after they discovered (more or less by chance) (53) the fate the government had decided for them:
"To whom it may concern:Not long afterwards, Ernesto Nazareno, a Filipino anti-nuclear activist, was kidnapped by the Marcos regime and apparently executed (46). The Bataan reactor was due to come on stream in early 1985 at a cost of nearly US$2 billion (38)."Comparing the past and the present situation in our Barrio, I can see that there is a big change happening now. This change has to do with the construction of the nuclear power plant by the National Power Corporation. This project is increasingly creating restlessness among us because our rights are slowly being taken away from us. Our right to fish in the sea is one. Part of our fishing ground is already covered with earth and in other places the water is no longer as clear as before. Without our consent our farms were taken over by the National Power Corporation. We depend for our livelihood on these; now they are part of a reservation area. Parts of the mountains were flattened for a housing project for engineers and other people who will work in the plant. They did not consider if our source of food and livelihood will be affected. They only saw their needs, and will meet them at the expense of all of us. For me our town is one of the most beautiful places and if we will be relocated we can never find another place equal to it. I think this is the most tragic thing that can happen to all of us here. l am praying that this will not come to pass.
"May people who are in a position to help, reach out to us soon, so that this impending tragedy will not befall us" (52).
During 1988 Westinghouse disposed of various units to Siemens, the large West German conglomerate, and linked its transport businesses to those of that country's AEG (54).
That year, Greenpeace in the USA accused it of creating two decades of pollution at its PCB incinerator plant at Bloomington, Indiana, where local people were arrested for demonstrating against the operation (55).
And, soon after the downfall of Marcos in the Philippines, the Aquino government began investigations of the huge Westinghouse Bataan reactor "scam", accusing the company of bribing Marcos and his cronies (56), while the government was saddled with a crippling $350,000 a day interest repayment on a plant which was never constructed (57).
Two years later, the Indonesian regime put out its grandiose (otiose?) nuclear power programme to tender, and Westinghouse was, of course, one of the companies putting in its bid ... (58). Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose ... ?
Further reading:
An excellent introduction to the Philippines deal is contained in Walden Bello, Peter Hayes & Lyuba Zarsky "500 mile island: The Philippine nuclear reactor deal", in Pacific Research (Pacific Studies Center,867 W Dana Street #204, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA) Vol. X, No. 1, 1979.
Contact: Nuclear Free Philippines Coalition (NFPC), Apostolic Center, 2215 Pedro Gil Street, Sta Ana, RP-Metro Manila, Philippines.
Philippines Support Group, 11 Goodwin Street, London N4, England.
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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