A former inspector on the original Keystone pipeline is sounding the alarm over TransCanada’s plans for the Keystone XL.
Mike Klink, a former Bechtel employee who surveyed the first Keystone pipeline, says he raised numerous concerns during construction that went ignored.
The first Keystone carries tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries in the Midwest, while the XL would extend that route to the Gulf Coast. Writing in Nebraska’s Lincoln Journal Star, Klink describes a number of safety and design flaws, including cheap foreign steel, weak foundations and rigged safety tests.
He concludes: "I am coming forward because my kids encouraged me to tell the truth about what was done and covered up... I am not telling you we shouldn’t build pipelines. We just should not build this one."
Klink says Bechtel fired him for voicing his complaints.
Some employees who are fired come back and shoot people. This one just came back to make sure the 22,000 people who would have a job if this shovel-ready project goes through don't have Christmas dinner next year.
Why is it his dissenting opinion is not included in two major studies in the industry that say this is a viable, a good, and an environmentally safe project?
Disgruntled employees don't tell you everything they know. They tell you everything that will cause you to hate the employer before you know all of the facts.
This project needs to be weighed in a reasonable light. The vast majority of other qualified reviewers found this to be a good project.
REALLY
In the 1950's I was a process operator at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant(ORGDP) also known as K-25.
Uranium 238 contains .7% of uranium 235 as it appears in nature. We took the mined material, flourinated it, heated the UO2F2 compound and fed it into a 4400 stage cascade as UF6, uranium hexaflouride (Process Gas...PG)which was pumped upstream through tubes with microscopic holes by a slightly increased factor and gradually separated the isotope from the uranium 238 which flowed downstream through the tubes by the same factor.
The monel steel pipes in that process were hundreds of miles long and some big enough for a normal si ed man to stand inside. Some of the converters were as big as a small house.There were five process buildings, K-25, K-27, K-29, K31 and the largest (K-33) was two stories with a partial basement, stood 83 ft. tall and covered about 32 acres. The K-33 facility, on the cell floor contained 640 GE or Westinghouse electric motors ranging in HP from 2000 to 3500. At it's peak the plant used as much electric power as the city of Chicago. The entire AEC(DOE) nation wide used 10% of all the generated power in the United States. At the time construction was finished K-33 was the third largest steel edifice in the world running third behind the Eifel Tower and the Empire State Building. There was no EPA. There was no OSHA. The safety department consisted of about twelve people and the only thing I ever saw them do was investigate lost time accidents and pass out safety awards every time we got more than a million manhours without a lost time accident.
The light green powder was everywhere. The odor of flourine(F2) and clourinetriflouride(CLF3) hanged heavy around the entire complex and on some days when the atmosphere was still and heavy we would get a sore throat from just breathing ambient air around the plants. There was a storage facility for Hydrogen Flouride(HF) and we had a tank farm for it's storage that if breached would have killed a swath of people two miles wide all the way to the east coast of the United States.
I tracked that kind of stuff home on the bottom of my street shoes to the carpet where my infant children were crawling and thank goodness through a fluke of being caught in a reduction in force worked there less than ten years.
So far the DOL has approved payment in excess of six billion dollars in claims to the families...often the survivors of employees of the Oak Ridge complexes who came up with every kind of rare cancer and ailment known to man and some which had never been heard of before. Employees who worked in K-1420, the decontamination facility could be recogni ed by a slight yellow complexion known among all employees as the 1420 tan. One of my close friends, Dave XXXXX worked there and during surgery at Erlanger hospital in Chattanooga the folks who worked up the diagnostics declared that he had a form of cancer which at that time only six other cases in the history of cancer records had been observed. He died while he was still in his forties.
The ORGDP is being dismantled and destroyed as we speak. Some heritage groups tried to make the "U" building, K-25 a national monument because that's where the uranium isotope which was used in the "Little Boy" bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 originated but even the concrete foundations had absorbed so much toxin and radiation that they're having to break everything up into pieces, treat it and bury it.
Companies have always done whatever is necessary for a profitable bottom line, What would lead anyone to believe it's any different now
