Die dunkle Seite eines Bauriesen

Ein (englischer, mit kurzer deutscher Zusammenfassung) Artikel von Antti Rautiainen vom Oktober 2004 über die Hintergründe der Proteste in Perm gegen die Praktiken der "Washington Group International" bei der Entsorgung von Raketentreibstoff - in Russland, der Ukraine und den USA.

Kurze deutsche Zusammenfassung:

In Perm gibt es seit längerem Proteste, die sich im Laufe der letzten Monate zu einer internationalen Kampagne ausgewachsen haben, gegen den Vertrag den das US-Unternehmen WGI bekommen hat zur Entsorgung von Restbeständen von Raketentreibstoff. Unter anderem steht die dabei angewandte Technologie im Zentrum der Kritik - und die Ängste für Gesundheit und Umwelt. Der Autor fasst in diesem Artikel die gesamten Geschäfte von WGI zusammen, unter anderem auch atomare Entsorgung in den USA selbst, auf "Indianerland", aber auch in anderen Ländern und will mit den dort gemachten Erfahrungen die Gründe für eine Kampagne gegen WGI untermauern. hrw)

Dark side of a construction giant

Washington Group International , inc. (WGI) is a playground of Montana's billionaire, Dennis R. Washington. Washington's property assets sum to 1.8 billion dollars, which earns him 236th place in Forbes 500 ranking of richest people in the world. WGI emerged in year 2000, its core operationsinherited from the construction giant Morrison Knudsen (revenue of $2.5 billion in 1994), famous for building Hoover Dam, which the smaller Washington Construction Group (worth $500 million in 1994) acquired after a bankruptcy in 1996.

Immediately trouble faced the renamed corporation, WGI, when its purchase of Raytheon Engineers & Constructors landed it in a mess of badly managed contracts and debts of the latter. After mutual threats about court processes, WGI made peace with both Raytheon, which it accused of disinformation, and its creditors, but Dennis Washington had to give up his share of the stocks when all of the stock was divided between creditors. He is still chair of the board of the corporation which he created.

Headquarters of WGI are located in Boise of Idaho, with approximately 27,000 employees in more than 30 countries of the world. This brave new transnational corporate giant of the 21st Century has many different fields of operation, including power generation, transmission and distribution, mining, nuclear services, manufacturing, transportation and others around the world. Given the massive scale of company's operation, it is not very surprising that WGI is becoming a serious environmental and social concern.

Yucca Mountain

In association with TRW (recently acquired by Northrop Grumman), WGI is providing subsurface design and construction management services to the Yucca Mountain High Level Nuclear Waste Repository located in southern Nevada. WGI is one of the corporations majorly involved in the project. Yucca Mountain is the only site under study for the permanent disposal of high level nuclear waste in USA. Located only 80 miles from Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain is one of the most seismically active areas in the USA with 621 seismic events of a 2.5 magnitude or greater in the last 20 years.

In 1992, a magnitude 5.2 quake caused over a million dollars in damage to government buildings at the Yucca Mountain site. Las Vegas has 1.5 million inhabitants, and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

The plan involves moving over 77,000 metric tons of hazardous nuclear waste across the country, using rails and roads that pass through other major metropolitan areas and small towns across USA. A sizeable movement of local inhabitants, anti-nuclear and indigenious activists has been fighting against the project for years. Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn temporarily vetoed project in spring of year 2002. US Senator Reid is opposed to the project, but members of the US Congress loyal to Bush from the big industry lobbies gave the green light to the project in June of 2002. Local activists however confirm that the struggle has only begun.

According to the treaty which dates back to 1863 and is still in force, Yucca Mountain is located in Western Shoshone lands. Like almost every treaty the United States has entered into with Indian Nations, the treaty with the Western Shoshone has been violated again and again. The Nevada Test Site was carved out of their territory and today, the Western Shoshone Nation is the most bombed nation on earth. The United States has detonated more than 1,200 atomic bombs in their territory. High rates of cancer and illness related to atomic fall-out plague the people, who suffer from this historic injustice without any government health assessment, rectification or medical aid. Thus, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Depository Project is another violation of the rights of the Western Shoshone, who have been among most determined campaigners against the project.

Corporations involved in Yucca mountain project this far have not been too committed to follow working safety regulations. Washington Group International rank highest among these corporations, and is facing a class action lawsuit for exposing workers and visitors to dangerous levels of silica and other toxic dust during tunneling from 1992 to 1996. Hundreds of workers may get sick and face death due to disregarding security measures, and suspected alteration of documentation in order to misrepresent potentially hazardous dust levels at the site.

Nuclear (un)safety in USA

Several times, projects under administration of Washington Group International in the US have been penalized by the Department of Energy, according to Price-Anderson legislation concerning sanctions for nuclear safety violations. In October 2003 WGI was fined $55,000 by the Department
of Energy, because RTS Wright Industries, LLC, (RTS), a supplier for which Washington Group International (WGI) had direct contractual responsibility, had falsified quality control inspection records in Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). RTS was retained by WGI to fabricate components for the facility. RTS was cited for falsifying inspection records, failing to comply with its procedures related to quality control stamps, and with failing to implement an adequate quality improvement process to identify and correct quality assurance deficiencies.

WGI was cited for failing to properly establish adequate surveillance and oversight for the work performed by RTS. Fortunately, this violation did not result in harm to workers or the environment.In March of 1999, WGI bought America's largest commercial nuclear reactor producer Westinghouse together with British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). With this purchase, WGI became also co-operator of Westinghouse Savannah River Company, nuclear facility located in one of the most contaminated area in the USA. In April 2004, the Westinghouse Savannah River Company was fined
$206,250 for the unnecessary radiation exposure of three employees and the subsequent falsification of radiation dose records. The radiation exposures had occurred at the FB-Line facility during material repackaging activities on the morning of July 29, 2003.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Washington Group International become one of five companies invited by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to participate in a"secret bidding" process for contracts to help rebuild Iraq. In April 2003, the secret bids made international news, with England's Sunday Herald reporting, "All the American firms to get Iraqi reconstruction contracts have bankrolled George Bush and the Republican Party, or have direct links to USAID." The Herald went on to note that Washington Group International "gave $438,700 to the Republicans," placing it in the same select group as Halliburton, the company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton, has attracted most of the press attention for its Iraq-related contracts, it is hardly the whole story. All companies sharing Iraqi pie are tightly connected, for example executive vice president and CFO of WGI, George H. Juetten previously was senior vice president and CFO for Dresser Industries, a subsidiary of Halliburton Inc.On March 12, 2004, the Program Management Office awarded the company a contract with a ceiling of $500,000,000 for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in the northern region of Iraq. A joint venture with Black& Veatch Joint Venture was awarded a contract with a maximum value of $600,000,000 for work in the public works and water sector. The joint venture also holds a contract worth $33 million for electrical work.

In Afghanistan, contracts won by Washington Group International, along with Fluor Continental and Perini, will cover rebuilding damaged roads and replacing a destroyed bridge in Afghanistan as part of their individual contracts to support U.S. military's Central Command (CENTCOM). Those contracts have a minimum value of $500,000 and a maximum of $500 million. Whatever the final result of Dubya's adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq may be, WGI has put itself firmly in the camp of the final winners.Pavlograd, Ukraine As part of the international disarmament treaties, Russia and Ukrainia have to retool former nuclear missile factories to dismantle old missile engines and their fuel. In practice this is done with American technology and to a large extent with American money as well.

On their own webpage, WGI boasts about its Dniepropetrovsk operation as an ultimate success story. As they put it,"When Washington Group managers and engineers first set foot in Dniepropetrovsk in 1995 the town, with its checkpoints and guard stations, still had the look of a closed city, even if the oppressive feeling of the Soviet presence was gone. Today the check points and guard stations remain, but are unmanned and there are statues of Lenin about town-but with
Coca-Cola advertisements hanging from his neck."Reality in Pavlograd is more grim. For years, the American partner of WGI in Pavlograd, Thiokol promoted hydrodynamic method and volunteered to assume responsibility for this stage of disposal of solid fuel from missiles, provided that the Ukrainian engineers from the rocket factory shared with it the technology of solid rocket fuel processing into explosives. Then suddenly, after American engineers announced that the hydrodynamic method is not "technically sound nor financially feasible", and having spent at least24 million dollars of Pentagon money (of a contract worth $54 million), WGI withdrew from the project. The most likely reason is that the Pentagon feared that explosives made in the process of recycling solid rocket fuels could be also used for military purposes. When nuclear warheads were sent back to Russia, and solid fuel were separated from missiles, US governement concluded that Ukraine's cold war heritage did not pose a threat anymore. Thus, Pavlograd inhabitants are left to cope with 5000 tons of extremely hazardous solid rocket fuel the best way they can.

US government and WGI promote burning fuel as a solution - a method which is banned in the USA, with exception of some special cases in Nevada desert, dozens of kilometers from the nearest settlement (but in Western Shoshone territory). According to Russian and American specialists, solid rocket fuel burned at a temperature of 3500 degrees of Celsius results in poisonous dioxins being formed in the cooling stream of gases emitted during the process. Even small doses of dioxins are poisonous; they easily accumulate in the food chain, hurt embryos and cause cancer. They are chemically stable, yet stay lethally dangerous for several decades.Ukraine has refused to burn solid fuel, and is looking for other sources of finance. Although the main responsible for this shameful episode is surely American government, WGI is happily distributing lies and disinformation
about the "safety" of burning rockets according to the needs of its biggest.

In Perm, Russia, burning has been the proposed solution from the beginning - this has caused uproar among local inhabitants.Perm, RussiaFGUP Perm Factory Mashinostroitel has been given a license to become the leading company in Russia in the field of decommissioning missiles using solid fuel rockets, most importantly SS-24 "Scalpel" missiles which have a flight radius of 10 000 kilometers armed with up to 20 nuclear warheads of 550 kilotons (46 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb). Missiles to be dismantled have their nuclear warheads removed. Although missile cases are still slightly radioactive, the main problem is the extremely poisonous fuel they are loaded with. They plan to build a site inside the factory of S.M. Kirov, which currently builds and tests engines of strategic missiles. Mashinostroitel decided to fulfil its task without wasting time to acquiring necessary permissions and preparing environmental impact assessments, as demanded by law.

American funding, given within the framework of the 13-year-old Lugar-Nunn legislation, is very crucial to the project. Actually, regional powers have already wasted a lion's share of the money given 7 years ago, and currently the social budget has been shrunk so that the project may be finally realized without having the American government asking questions about whose pocket all that money ended up back then. This money is channelled through Washington Group International. Last autumn American Congressman Richard Lugar himself visited Perm, to ensure that the legislation he endorsed with Senator Samuel Nunn is followed to the letter.

The Perm project was halted once already. At the end of the nineties, Trutnev, the governor of Perm oblast, promised not to build the facility, fulfilling one of his main election promises. However in spring of 2004 Trutnev got invited to the second government of Putin. In exchange he has kept quiet about the project. Completing the project in Perm became more important when a similar project in Votkinsk of neighbouring Udmurtian republic collapsed due to popular unrest back in 2002. Perm inhabitants have organized themselves as well with protest actions against dismantling rockets in the city being organized since September 2003, and a protest camp against project launched July 2, 2004 lasted until 7th of September the same year.

Antti Rautiainen