Abstract
How did the British government get so deeply involved in the U.S. weapons complex cleanup?
When the Bush administration announced its much-anticipated new energy policy in May, the oil, gas, and coal companies weren't the only ones cheering. From across the Atlantic, the head of a British government-owned enterprise added his enthusiastic endorsement. Hugh Collum, the chairman of British Nuclear Fuels plc–commonly known as BNFL–was particularly delighted by Vice President Dick Cheney's recommendation that the United States take a new look at nuclear power and nuclear fuel reprocessing.
New BNFL chairman, Hugh Collum.
“We are very pleased with the Bush administration's proposals,” Col-lum said in a company news release. “If the full potential of the proposed changes are realized in the United States, BNFL will be well positioned to provide nuclear reactor technology and associated fuel, equipment, and services.”
Collum's statement attracted little attention in the United States, but its significance was noted by the British press. The Guardian called the Cheney plan a “huge boost” to BNFL, which is still recovering from a data-falsification scandal that had critics declaring the company all but finished.
What makes the Cheney plan particularly significant for BNFL is the fact that in 1999 the company bought Westing house Electric Co., which designed half of the world's nuclear power plants and 60 percent of those in the United States.
“If George W. Bush is successful in encouraging the building of nuclear power stations in America, the chances are that they will be built, albeit indirectly, by the British government,” observed The Telegraph. Even if Westinghouse were to build just a few of the plants, predicted The Guardian, “it would make BNFL a very rich company.”
The importance of U.S. energy policy to BNFL underscores how the company, once a domestic enterprise that primarily provided fuel for British nuclear reactors, has grown into a global empire with 23,000 employees in 15 countries and annual revenues of $2.5 billion. Now active in virtually every aspect of the nuclear industry, the company boasts a 12 percent share of the world market.
The main driving force behind BNFL's expansion appears to be the British government's desire to partially privatize the company, which was spun off from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority as a government-owned corporation in 1971. The government wants to sell 49 percent of the company's shares to private investors in hopes of raising as much as $2 billion. Enormous liabilities from the future decommissioning of BNFL facilities, however, combined with operating losses and uncertainty surrounding the future of its controversial Sellafield complex in northwest England, have deferred the privatization plan.
That motivated BNFL to turn its sights on the United States, where in 1990 it launched a subsidiary, BNFL Inc., headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. BNFL Inc. has landed a number of high-profile cleanup contracts in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. But problems have followed the company across the pond, highlighted by the loss last year of the contract to clean up the Energy Department's Hanford site near Richland, Washington.
BNFL's name has increasingly been connected with nuclear controversies. In 1999, when the Australian government rejected a plan by a U.S.-based firm, Pangea, to build a nuclear waste dump in the outback, the British press revealed that BNFL had invested millions of dollars in the scheme. In the Czech Republic, Westinghouse helped to complete the Temelin nuclear reactor, which is the subject of mass protests, a lawsuit, and a dispute with neighboring Austria.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, BNFL's core operation at Sellafield is at the epicenter of a battle over the country's future nuclear policy, much of which centers on whether to license a new $650-million mixed-oxide fuel facility, the Sellafield MOX Plant.
A “nuclear dustbin”
Since its inception, BNFL has been reviled by anti-nuclear groups and criticized by Britain's neighbors. Its Sellafield complex was the site of the infamous 1957 Windscale reactor fire and has been dubbed “the nuclear dustbin of Europe” by its detractors. The chief activity at Sellafield, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for the domestic nuclear-power industry and for overseas customers–primarily Japan and Germany–has resulted in extensive pollution.
A Greenpeace protest at Sellafield, April 1995.
For decades, Sellafield has discharged plutonium and other radionuclides into the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic, prompting growing protests from the Irish as well as Nordic governments.
BNFL maintains that the pollution Sellafield releases is dwarfed by naturally occurring radioactivity and says it has reduced discharges by more than 99 percent since the 1970s. But under pressure from other European governments, Britain reluctantly signed a 1998 agreement to reduce radionuclides in the marine environment to “close to zero” by 2020. Still, the Nordic and Irish governments continue to push for a complete end to reprocessing at Sellafield.
Reprocessing has also been widely criticized as a proliferation risk. Earlier this year, a study by the Oxford Research Group warned that terrorists could easily build a crude nuclear bomb with fuel from the MOX plant. The study's lead scientist, physicist Frank Barna-by, declared that licensing the plant would be “sheer irresponsibility.”
Global shipments of nuclear fuel to and from Sellafield have also been controversial. Dozens of nations oppose shipments through their waters, citing safety concerns.
The bottom line for Sellafield's future, however, appears to be its dubious financial prospects. Critics claim reprocessing simply isn't cost effective. And with a worldwide glut of uranium, it is much cheaper to simply manufacture new reactor fuel. In terms of disposing of spent fuel, storage is widely seen as cheaper than reprocessing. British Energy, a major BNFL reprocessing customer, has tried to get out of its contract, saying it could save two-thirds of its spent-fuel management costs by switching to storage. The company's finance director calls reprocessing “economic nonsense” that “should stop straight away.”
BNFL, however, has stuck by its guns and is betting Sellafield's future on the new MOX plant, which a recent government study estimates could generate $300 million in revenues over the facility's lifetime. Although the plant was completed in 1996, uncertainty about the global market for MOX fuel has caused the British government to hold off on licensing.
Despite the problems and controversy surrounding Sellafield–or perhaps because of them–Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has pushed for the partial privatization of BNFL. Last year, following a two-year study, Britain's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) concluded that privatization would be in the public interest, as it would infuse the company with an “entrepreneurial spirit.”
The desire to privatize was not related to “incompetence or underper-formance” on BNFL's part, the DTI emphasized. Rather, the recent transformation of the company into a global operation necessitated a “fresh look” at its structure, the department said.
But Mark Johnston, nuclear campaigner for the British chapter of Friends of the Earth, has a different theory as to what is driving the proposed privatization.
“The New Labour administration is in its heart grossly embarrassed by BNFL,” Johnston says. “BNFL is an ‘old economy’ business which doesn't fit with Labour's political project to modernize the British economy. Privatization is a means of getting the problem off its hands.”
BNFL at a glance
Offices in
Brussels, Dunkirk, Dusseldorf, Kiev, Madrid, Mannheim, Manosque, Moscow, Munich, Nivelles, Prague, Ringhals, Sofia, St. Quentin en Yve-lines, Stockholm, Vasteras, Beijing, Tokyo, Kobe, Taipei, Seoul, and throughout the United States and Britain
In 1999, BNFL bought Westinghouse Electric, extending its reach to
• nearly 50 percent of the world's nuclear power plants
• nearly 60 percent of U.S. nuclear power plants
• Soviet-designed nuclear power plants in Russia and Ukraine
• Sweden's Ringhals nuclear power plant
• the Czech Republic's Temelin nuclear power plant
Capabilities
• BNFL operates nuclear fuel reprocessing and MOX fuel plants at Sellafield; reprocesses German and Japanese spent fuel.
• BNFL Inc. handles complex nuclear cleanups in the United States.
• BFNL Instruments provides instruments and services for measuring radioactivity.
• BNFL Direct Rail Services transports spent nuclear fuel throughout Britain.
• BNFL's Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd operates a fleet of ships that can carry any kind of nuclear materials to any international port (that will accept it).
What's next?
Westinghouse Electric has additional contracts, or is anticipating contracts, in: South Korea, Germany, South Africa, Bulgaria, China, Japan, and throughout the United States.
A gigantic market
With the apparent goal of making BNFL more attractive to private investors, the company was busy expanding around the globe in the 1990s. According to the DTI's report, one goal to be met before privatization was for U.S. operations to contribute 15 percent of BNFL's profits. “Much of BNFL's future hangs on the reputation of its U.S. subsidiary,” the report stated.
In 1995, BNFL Inc. became involved in Energy Department cleanup work at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver through a joint venture with a U.S. engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen. In the next two years, the company's U.S. subsidiary won major cleanup contracts at Energy sites at Savannah River, South Carolina; the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory; and the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge.
In 1998, the company announced it had landed what was possibly the world's biggest nuclear cleanup con-tract–a 20-year, $6.9-billion project to design, license, construct, and operate a facility that would treat and immobilize 55 million gallons of radioactive liquid wastes stored in underground tanks at Hanford.
With the end of the Cold War bringing about the decommissioning of much of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, a gigantic new market had opened up for BNFL.
According to David Campbell, a BNFL Inc. spokesman, the company was able to take advantage of the new market because of its experience in cleaning up nuclear facilities in Britain, which had a headstart on the United States in terms of decommissioning. “We're experienced nuclear-waste managers,” Campbell said. “Other companies, architect and engineering companies, they don't have those experiences.”
But Bill Weida, a Colorado College professor and former Pentagon economist, offers another explanation for BNFL Inc.'s rapid expansion. Weida says a new Energy contracting approach, known as “privatization,” aided BNFL.
Under Energy's old “cost-plus” model, contractors were reimbursed for their expenses and then received an additional fee. But under the privatization scheme, contractors submit bids to carry out entire projects at a fixed price. The companies must then bear the up-front costs of financing, designing, building, and operating facilities and are paid by the department as they deliver results, usually in the form of processing waste.
The problem, Weida says, is that these contracts require vast amounts of private financing at high risk. For most companies, the rate of return on the projects doesn't justify the risk, he says. But as a government-owned entity, BNFL was able to borrow capital at low government rates and submit attractive bids.
“They had the same cost of capital as the British government did,” Weida said. “That's where they get their money from.”
In 1997, Weida predicted that because of its competitive advantage, BNFL would end up establishing a monopoly on cleanup work.
“They essentially did establish a monopoly, and they wound up all over the place,” Weida says today.
Campbell says Weida is wrong. “The fact of the matter is, we didn't borrow at government rates in the UK, because we didn't have access to that,” Campbell said. “We had to borrow like everyone else would have had to borrow.”
In fact, the cost of BNFL's Hanford project ended up skyrocketing exactly because of the high cost of private financing, Campbell says. He also downplays BNFL's role in the nuclear-cleanup market.
“We don't have that many contracts in the United States. We only have, really, four or five.” However, he said, “they tend to be visible ones because they're very difficult and challenging.”
It could be argued that the most significant component of BNFL's U.S. expansion was not its entry into the cleanup market but its $1.1 billion takeover of Westinghouse, completed with help from Morrison Knudsen. As part of the deal, BNFL took full ownership of Westing-house's nuclear engineering division, now Westinghouse Electric.
BNFL's chief executive at the time, John Taylor, hinted at the importance of the takeover by saying it “laid the foundation” for meeting performance targets that would enable the company's privatization.
The Westinghouse subsidiary grew larger last year when BNFL acquired the nuclear operations of the global engineering firm ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) for $485 million and reintegrated them into Westing-house. Today, Westinghouse accounts for one-third of BNFL's worldwide business.
Things fall apart
With its expansion rolling along, BNFL's prospects in the late 1990s were looking “reasonably bright,” in the words of the DTI.
But just as quickly, things began to unravel.
In September 1999, the British newspaper The Independent revealed that personnel at Sellafield's MOX Demonstration Facility–a prototype for the Sellafield MOX Plant–had falsified quality-assurance data on MOX fuel destined for Japan. Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate launched an extensive inquiry and concluded in February 2000 that although a few individuals had been directly responsible, the company as a whole suffered from “systematic management failure” and lack of a “safety culture.”
The Inspectorate found that data had been falsified since at least 1996. The agency also investigated Sell-afield's overall safety performance and characterized it as “poor.”
The company's largest foreign customers reacted by suspending MOX imports. To appease the Japanese, BNFL agreed to pay $56 million in compensation and to take back the fuel fabricated with the falsified data.
Numerous top BNFL managers and directors were replaced, including Taylor, the chief executive.
In the United States, a group of more than 40 organizations spearheaded by the Government Accountability Project reacted by petitioning Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to ban BNFL from holding Energy Department contracts “due to the firm's global record of repeated, serious violations of environmental laws, regulations, and standards as well as a pattern of lies, deceptions, and false statements to the public and governmental officials.”
Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project says that although Richardson later ordered a review of BNFL's operations, “We never got a formal response” to the petition.
Citing the fallout from the falsification scandal, the DTI recommended holding off on plans to privatize BNFL until 2002. The company agreed, saying it needed to regroup.
Friends of the Earth's Johnston, however, calls the scandal an excuse to put off privatization, suggesting it was merely a symptom of greater problems.
“Privatization is slipping because the task is so tricky,” he said. “The MOX episode has provided convenient political cover for a much larger difficulty.”
Trouble in America
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, things were about to get even worse.
Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, a Jackson, Wyoming, citizen group, was suing to stop BNFL's plans to build a waste incinerator at Energy's laboratory in Idaho. The group claimed that smoke and ash would escape from the incinerator, contaminating the Yellowstone ecosystem less than 100 miles downwind. In March 2000, Energy agreed to settle the lawsuit by halting construction of the incinerator and appointing a panel to examine alternatives.
At Oak Ridge, controversy had been brewing over BNFL's plans to “recycle” radioactive metals from decommissioned buildings by decontaminating them and selling them on the open scrap-metal market. BNFL originally estimated it could complete the Oak Ridge project for $293 million but had put in a bid of $238 million, planning to make up the difference by selling the recycled metal.
According to critics, BNFL sold Energy on the project under false pretenses. The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, in a lawsuit, alleged that BNFL had fraudulently claimed to have experience in recycling the most valuable of the metals, nickel, when it fact it did not.
While the lawsuit was thrown out on technical grounds, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler issued an opinion critical of the project's lack of public scrutiny. She called BNFL's planned recycling process “entirely experimental.”
Environmental and consumer groups also questioned the general wisdom of releasing recycled radioactive metal into the marketplace. In January 2000, reacting to a storm of criticism, Secretary Richardson declared a moratorium on the sale of nickel from Oak Ridge. Five months later, he banned the release of any ra-dioactively contaminated scrap metals from department sites.
Aside from the metals controversy, BNFL's projected costs at Oak Ridge were growing. An audit by Energy's inspector general in September 2000 found the project to be at least two years behind schedule and $94 million over budget.
According to Campbell, Energy originally underestimated the scope of the project. But BNFL had to take Energy's estimate at face value, because company personnel initially lacked security clearances to enter the facilities it was supposed to decommission. “We had to take their word on what was in those buildings,” Campbell said. Once inside, he said, “one of the things we discovered was that there was a lot more material in the buildings than the government had told us.”
Scrap at Oak Ridge.
Through good times and bad
Campbell says the company eventually submitted claims for about $100 million in additional compensation. The company is still negotiating those claims with the government. Meanwhile, the Energy Department has agreed to buy the Oak Ridge scrap metal.
Even with the overruns, Campbell said, Energy is still saving on the Oak Ridge project.
“The government had estimated for them to do that job would have cost somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion,” he said. Even if the cost reaches $400 million, “that's still a tremendous savings to the U.S. taxpayer,” he added.
And even though BNFL is losing money on the project, the company has pledged to complete it.
“There are some losses that we're going to take there, but we're still going to get the job done, because this is the type of work that we do,” Campbell said. “If we can't succeed in the nuclear world, we don't have any place to go.”
The biggest blow to BNFL Inc.'s reputation came when the company presented revised cost estimates for the Hanford project in April 2000. Having initially told Energy that it could complete the project for $6.9 billion, the company revised its estimate upward to $15.2 billion.
Calling BNFL's proposal “outrageously expensive and inadequate in many ways,” Richardson terminated the contract. Top Hanford managers for both Energy and BNFL were replaced, and the overruns at Hanford and Oak Ridge sparked a congressional inquiry.
According to Campbell, one reason for the Hanford overruns was that, once again, the project's scope grew.
But the main problem, he said, was that the privatization approach turned out to be inappropriate for a project of Hanford's size. Enormous financing costs made up more than half the total cost estimate.
“The cost of carrying money for a project of that size, and for as long as we would have had to carry it, was too expensive,” Campbell said.
Still, he said, BNFL shares blame for the problems at Oak Ridge and Hanford.
At Oak Ridge “we had problems that were our fault when we started the project,” he acknowledged. “Same with Hanford. I mean, we surprised ourselves with how expensive the project got.”
But he also noted that Energy approved BNFL's design work at Hanford and that the department has paid the company for all of its work at the site.
“We've been paid in full,” Campbell said. “They've bought all the technology that we delivered.”
Cost overruns weren't the only problem to plague BNFL Inc., however. Safety problems were also drawing attention, mirroring concerns at Sellafield.
A series of accidents led BNFL to suspend its Oak Ridge cleanup work in April 1999. And an Energy Department investigation concluded that production priorities had taken precedence over environmental, safety, and health considerations at the site.
“Consequently, workers in certain facilities were subject to unnecessary exposures of radioactive and hazardous materials, and environmental contamination resulted,” Energy reported.
In April 2000, department inspectors at Hanford documented an incident in which a BNFL deputy project manager ignored a stop-work order issued by a quality-assurance manager. In May the manager who issued the order was reassigned.
“These findings represent a very serious problem,” the regulators wrote. The reassignment “created the appearance of retribution,” and the refusal to stop work suggested “a preference to schedule over quality,” they concluded.
To Carpenter, the Hanford incident was reminiscent of the Sellafield scandal. Both showed lapses in quality assurance. “I think there's a little trend here that causes concern about the corporate philosophy and culture of this company,” Carpenter said.
In March 2000, Secretary Richardson announced he would direct a “top-to-bottom” review of the company's operations. “We are now placing BNFL under extra scrutiny,” the secretary declared. “I have been uneasy about some of their operations in the United States.” He added: “Business as usual is over with BNFL.”
The underground waste tanks at Hanford.
A BNFL ship, the Pacific Teal, loads MOX fuel bound for Japan from a French reprocessing plant
The long road back
In BNFL Inc.'s own words, last year was “one of the most difficult periods in its 10-year existence.” Since then, BNFL as a whole has focused on winning back confidence among its customers and the public. Today, the company says, it has changed.
“Having gone through what we've gone through, having changed some of our ways, having had the government come and make suggestions, having worked with the regulators in two different countries, I think we've come out stronger and a better company, focused more highly on safety,” Campbell said.
In April 2000, BNFL's leaders in Britain announced changes to “streamline” management, enhance accountability, and “ensure safety remains the number one priority.”
In the United States, BNFL Inc. carried out similar changes. “The company as a whole had to step back and look at itself,” Campbell said.
“There was a directive from the UK for the company to do a complete scrubbing down and figure out where it needed to go.”
In June 2000, the findings of Energy's independent reviewers were announced.
While the review team recommended improvements in some areas, it concluded that BNFL management systems were not only generally “adequate to meet DOE safety and quality requirements” but in fact “compare favorably with other DOE contractors.”
“The team did not find major weaknesses in BNFL operations and projects for DOE that compare to those identified by [Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate] at Sell-afield,” the reviewers wrote.
In Britain, the Inspectorate's chief inspector declared last February that conditions at Sellafield had “greatly improved” since the agency's initial damning report.
“I would point to the fact that two governments–the United States and the United Kingdom–have looked at BNFL operations and have said, ‘Things are pretty good there,’” Campbell commented. The
U.S. review, he added, “is the most comprehensive review of any contractor that the Department of Energy has ever conducted. And we came out equal to or better, in most cases, than every other contractor.”
As one might expect, the company's critics are not convinced.
In Britain, Greenpeace noted that the Inspectorate's own report showed BNFL had yet to implement 25 of 28 safety recommendations the agency had issued a year earlier. Greenpeace called the report a “shocking indictment of Sellafield's continuing safety crisis.” In the United States, Bob Schaeffer of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability called Energy's review of BNFL Inc. a “whitewash.” While the review team visited BNFL sites and interviewed company managers, it did not interview any of the groups that had petitioned Richardson to debar the company.
“If there are allegations about a party, one would think that an investigation would at least go to the maker of those allegations and try and find out what they were,” Schaeffer complained. “A large number of groups signed the petition, and none of them were contacted as far as I know. It was an effort to brush the problem under the rug and make it look like they'd done something.” Meanwhile, accidents and safety breaches continue.
Three separate fires broke out in BNFL facilities in Britain between December and May, although the company says no injuries or radioactive releases resulted from any of the blazes.
In January, “a major disaster” was narrowly averted at Sellafield when more than 2,000 tons of highlevel nuclear waste nearly exploded,
The Observer reported. According to the newspaper, workers monitoring high-level waste tanks ignored alarms warning of a buildup of explosive gases for nearly three hours. The incident triggered another safety inquiry by the Inspectorate and the suspension of reprocessing operations.
In March, a BNFL train carrying three empty spent-nuclear-fuel casks derailed in Scotland. The company called it a “very low speed minor derailment” and again emphasized that “at no point during this incident was there any risk at all to the general public.”
In July, workers at a BNFL nuclear power plant in Scotland were briefly exposed to radiation when spent fuel rods were accidentally dropped. Also in July, a small fire broke out in the K-25 facility at Oak Ridge, which is being decommissioned by BNFL.
Just as the accidents appear to have set back BNFL's efforts to recover its reputation among the public, continued poor performance and cost overruns have had a similar effect on the company's foreign customers.
Although the fuel shipments to foreign customers that were suspended last year have resumed, documents leaked to the press in May suggested that power companies in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Holland, and Italy continue to threaten to pull out of their reprocessing contracts with BNFL, worth a total of $8.5 billion. According to The Independent, customers accused BNFL of not reprocessing on time or at agreed prices.
“If BNFL's underperformance continues,” the customers threatened, “there could be a complete loss of confidence in all aspects of BNFL's services.”
The company hasn't recovered financially, either. In June, it announced a second consecutive year of losses, in the amount of $296 million.
Company chairman Collum called its performance “unacceptable” in some areas and conceded that privatization might need to be put off even further, perhaps until 2004 or 2005.
In the United States, BNFL Inc. also lost money last year, partly because it accounted for its Oak Ridge losses in the 2000 budget, Campbell said.
As part of a new approach, Campbell said, the company will focus more on its core areas of expertise, decommissioning and waste treatment, and less on going after large, integrated contracts.
“Right now we're not looking at actually leading many of these efforts,” Campbell said. “We're probably coming in more as a strong second-tier contractor to bring technology, nuclear operations, or design experience into the team.”
BNFL Inc. was recently part of a consortium bidding to convert and stabilize depleted uranium hexafluo-ride at Oak Ridge, but the team failed to land the contract. Campbell said other opportunities may arise at Hanford, which is still using BNFL's treatment facility design and has several plutonium facilities awaiting decommissioning. And Savannah River is planning a facility to process salts formerly used in high-level waste reprocessing, he noted.
“There are opportunities that are coming up, but they are probably not until the end of the year,” Campbell said.
Will blackouts save BNFL?
In the meantime, the next few months could see a decision by the British government on whether to license the Sellafield MOX Plant. The government recently concluded a fourth round of public input on the matter and is scheduled to make a decision soon, although Friends of the Earth has filed a lawsuit charging that the government illegally restricted the input process.
BNFL says it has sufficient orders from abroad to make the plant viable, but doubts remain about the future market for MOX. In a referendum in May, residents of Kariwa, Japan, home to one of the world's largest nuclear power plants, rejected the use of MOX.
With the future of reprocessing at Sellafield still in limbo, environmental groups and some of Britain's neighbors have suggested that BNFL focus entirely on cleanup work.
The company, meanwhile, appears to have other plans. It now seems to be eyeing Westinghouse's nuclear power business as its savior.
The British government has recently flirted with the idea of nuclear power expansion. Tony Blair has asked his new energy minister, Brian Wilson–whom Greenpeace calls “aggressively pro-nuclear”–to carry out a review of the nation's energy policy.
In June, BNFL submitted a proposal to replace aging reactors in Britain with up to six new Westinghouse-designed plants.
One environmental group called the proposal “an exercise for saving BNFL from bankruptcy.”
Meanwhile, also in June, Collum was in Washington, D.C., to lobby for more American nuclear power plants. Just a little more than a year earlier, BNFL had been a near-pariah inside the Beltway. Now, Collum was invited to the White House for a closed-door meeting with Cheney and Andrew Lundquist, the head of the administration's energy task force.
Perhaps it helped that James Schlesinger, a former U.S. secretary of both energy and defense, serves on BNFL Inc.'s board of directors. Last year, Schlesinger was on the steering committee of a group called Americans for Bush-Cheney, organized by the Bush 2000 campaign.
But more than anything, the timing of America's energy problems was “brilliant” for BNFL, Collum told The Guardian.
“The best news for us at BNFL,” he said, “is that the lights went out in California.”