Mexico City, Water, and Nuclear Diplomacy

Figure 1: Antonio Reynoso. Untitled, Texcoco, 1966.

 

This is the story of an astonishing proposal, a 1960s technological fix that, it was said, save Mexico City from collapse, provide fresh water to its inhabitants, and all through the implementation of nuclear power. It became the subject of intense and competitive diplomacy.

The scheme, known as the Texcoco project, was pitched to the UK Atomic Energy Authority in February 1965. Dr Arnulfo Morales-Amado, of the Mexican Comision Nacional Energia Nuclear (CNEN) introduced the issues:

Mexico City stood in a valley surrounded by mountains which was geologically an independent basin. Approximately 160 million gallons of water per day were being pumped out of the water lying beneath the city to supply its needs and as a consequence the city had been sinking about one foot a year for thirty years. In these circumstances the cost of maintaining the sewers and other plant and equipment was considerable.

There was, however, a second basin formation some 30 kilometres from Mexico City at Texcoco which, in view of the sinking of the Mexico City basin was now higher than the latter. There was therefore a danger that if an earthquake were to result in the two basins becoming joined, Mexico City would be flooded. For this reason the Texcoco basin had been dried out which, in view of the prevailing winds, had led to dust storms blowing over Mexico City. Moreover, the development of industry from the city towards Texcoco basin had had to be stopped.[1]

The inhabitants and industry of Mexico City used 320 million gallons per day, about half of which was purified and used again for agriculture, so usage was about 160 million gallons per day. This water was extracted from under the inhabitants’ feet. In Mexico City £10 million a year was spent on work necessitated by subsidence. The sinking of wells had been prohibited, and industrial development ‘was held up by reason of water shortage…. If the water problems could be solved, industrial development near Mexico City need no longer be held up’[2]

The CNEN’s proposal was

to meet these problems by the construction of a 500 MW(E) reactor which would provide power but would be primarily designed to enable water from the Texcoco basin to be desalted and piped to Mexico City. …. If successfully completed this operation would result in the sinking of the Texcoco basin as the water was drawn away and would enable water to be pumped back into the sub-strata of Mexico City. The later would therefore stop sinking, with a saving in maintenance costs, and the flood danger be obviated’[3] To put this in perspective, the total generating capacity of Mexico was 5,000MW(E), of which 2,000 MW(E) connected to the grid around the capital. [4]

This was the astonishing technocratic Mexican vision of hydrological, geological and environmental engineering through nuclear power and desalination.  While presented in London by Morales-Amado, it was largely the work of Dr Nabor Carrillo Flores. Carrillo is a fascinating figure. The brief biography, sent by telegram to the leading scientist of the UK nuclear weapons programme, and passed around Whitehall, captures his character succinctly:

Dr Nabor Carillo

Is the main driving force in the Commission. He is a man of great energy and enthusiasm. He won international fame as a soil scientist. Following his pioneering work in saving buildings, and designing foundations for new buildings in Mexico City, where the ground is sinking up to 1 ft/year, he is now consulted on similar problems around the world.

He comes from a remarkable family. He is of true Indian descent. His father is a well known composer who used a 16 tone scale many years before Schoenberg; his brother is the Mexican ambassador to Washington; his sister is a concern pianist, and he himself was rector of Mexico university for six years. He is a man of great charm, wide interests and very cultured. His outside interests are painting (he is a creditable painter himself, and was a personal friend of the late Diego Riviera), and music.

The revival (after a false start) of plans to establish atomic energy in Mexico is due to him.[5]

Carillo was a modernist and a technocrat.[6] The alternative to the Texcoco project, to pipe fresh water 150 kilometers from a river supply, would also, of course, have required energy, but it did not possess the sheen of atomic modernity; it lacked, in Gabrielle Hecht’s term, “nuclearity”.[7]

 

Figure 2: Dr Nabor Carrillo Flores by Juan O’Gorman, 1960s (Source: Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares). Figure 3: detail of painting, Carrillo is described at the ‘Autor del Proyecto Texcoco’)

Context

The context was a Mexican political system that had been under the firm grip of the Institutional Revolutionary Party since its foundation, under a different name, in 1929. At its head was the dictatorial President of the Republic. Under Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), policies shifted rightwards, state-guided industrialization accelerated, financed largely through US capital.[8] Through into the 1960s, multiple initiatives for massive infrastructure span out from the political centre: new railways, new superhighways, enormous hydroelectric dams, a Metro for Mexico City, and tourist resorts (first Acapulco, later Cancun) with airports. The economy of the “Mexican miracle” grew at up to 6% per year. But prosperity was by no means evenly shared. Rural poverty was devastating, and Mexicans who chose to move to the sprawling capital city, driving its population from 3 million in 1950 to nearly 9 million in 1970, struggled to find work and adequate housing.

Nuclear power appealed to this large-scale, infrastructural, technocratic, state-led style of industrial modernization. In 1955-6, under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958), as civil nuclear power stations opened in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, Mexico’s Comision Nacional Energia Nuclear (CNEN) was established.  The commission’s activities were at an appropriate scale: encouraging education and training in nuclear physics and engineering, uranium prospecting, researching applications for radioisotopes, and so on. An institute for nuclear research was announced in 1963, near Salazar, west of Mexico City, and it housed an accelerator and planned to run a small Geneal Atomics Triga Mark III research and training reactor, with uranium fuel sourced from the United States via the International Atomic Energy Agency.[9]  American nuclear feet were already on the ground.

Small-scale research reactors were one thing. Large scale nuclear power stations were another thing entirely. Both the United States and the United Kingdom had built power stations, on the back of military programmes, and foresaw an emerging and lucrative global market opening up as the world chose the modern and mighty atom for its electrical power.

Between 1957 and 1960 tantalising rumours of Mexico entering the marketplace as a purchaser of nuclear power stations circulated.[10]  Then, in 1960, ‘all these phantoms were swept away’:

The Commission [CNEN] in a discussion with members of the [British] Embassy staff … said that there was absolutely no chance then of the Mexicans purchasing a nuclear power station. Their sources of cheap power were still largely unexploited, generation of electricity by hydro-electric means could be multiplied seven times, and production of oil almost as much … Mexico’s real need was for scientists trained in nuclear techniques to enable the Government to undertake an unpretentious but solidly based nuclear programme some time in the next decade.[11]

The UK responds to the Texcoco project pitch

Despite this sweeping away of phantoms, atomic relations between the UK and Mexico grew. In 1959 a visit by Licenciado José Ortiz Tirado, who had moved from being once President of the Supreme Court of Mexico to be President of CNEN, to the Calder Hall power station in September 1959, had been covered approvingly by the Mexican press. Mexican scientists had attended UKAEA schools for nuclear education, and the Morales-Amado visit, at which the Texcoco project pitch had first been made, was in the context of CNEN wanting to send more staff on attachment for training on the commercially sensitive methods of isotope production at Amersham, Wantage and Harwell, just as they did to Canada, Karlsruhe and Oak Ridge. Mexican scientists at CNEN and those at universities received and read the UKAEA publication Atom. Carrillo had visited in autumn 1964, and established, it was noted in the Foreign Office, ‘good relationships’. UKAEA scientists travelled to Mexico on fact-finding missions.[12] When the nuclear centre at Salazar was being kitted out, British companies, such as Fairey Engineering and Nuclear Chemical Plant Limited, touted their wares.[13]  There seems ‘little doubt’, reported the British Embassy in Mexico City, ‘that the Mexican Government is determined to build up a nuclear industry as rapidly as they can [and[ there should be very good opportunities for British firms in this country’.[14]

But the scale and vision of the Texcoco project were something else altogether. There were also time constraints, caused by the political character of big infrastructural projects in Mexico. The project would have to be completed ‘in the present Mexican President [Gustavo Diaz Ordaz]’s six year term of office’, in other words by December 1970. This short timescale meant that off-the-peg reactor designs were the only ones the UK could offer. However, if the project was financed by international assistance, probably by borrowing from the World Bank, this in turn would create delays, since it was likely that a lengthy tendering process would be imposed. [15]  So there was room, opportunity even, for financial alternatives.

The UK suggest going in stages, starting with a Magnox, which could provide 300 MW(E) costing £30m and between £9-30million for the desalination plant. A larger 500MW(E) reactor  would cost about £45m, and could be either a larger Magnox or the new AGR design. Magnox was the first generation of UK reactors for power stations, based on the Calder Hall model opened in 1956. They were proven but already looking relatively primitive. Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) were the new, expensive design touted by the UK. The announcement of Dungeness B, the first AGR, was made and trumpeted in 1965, perhaps not least with a view for possible export sales. ‘Like you we were greatly impressed by the announcement about the Dungeness B Station and its implications for elsewhere’, wrote a Ministry of Overseas Development civil servant, adding ‘I have no doubt that the Mexicans will be made aware of the news and the reasons for the decision’.[16]

The desalination plant would be provided by Weir Westgarth, an innovative Glasgow firm that had built a business around Heriot-Watt university professor Robert Silver’s invention of the multi-stage flash desalination method.[17] Weir Westgarth had built the largest desalination in operation anywhere in the world in 1964 (in the Dutch East Indies, producing one and a half million gallons of fresh water per day).[18] Weir Westgarth also pitched for a desalination scheme in Tijuana, which used thermal energy power.[19] It’s main competitor was the American firm Westinghouse.[20]

The next steps suggested by the UK was a team visit by members of the UKAEA Reactor Group plus industry representatives, and to do a feasibility study. Weir Westgarth, would also need 6 months for a feasibility study for the desalination plant. There should also be a survey of Texcoco. When the question of whether an International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) survey would be acceptable was answered in the negative in London, since it would be done by Americans, and however ‘unbiased they pretend to be their report would be unlikely to favour the UK’.[21]

Nuclear diplomacy

On the face of it, Mexico would seem remote from UK diplomatic interests, or as a country that might look to Britain for technical assistance. But, in the long memory of the Foreign Office it was recalled that in the 1890s, when Mexico City was expanding, the lake receding, and the city was already liable to very severe flooding, the English engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson had built the Grand Canal ‘which … afforded relief for decades’. Pearson, later ennobled as Lord Cowdray had been the Liberal MP for Colchester (known as the ‘Member for Mexico’) and had been invited by President Porfirio Diaz to build a Mexican railway, and, while doing so, had discovered Mexican oil (the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company was later merged into Royal Dutch-Shell) [22] Perhaps Mexican memories were also long.

‘The Mexicans appear genuinely interested in close nuclear collaboration with us & I assume it wd be v. profitable to us to encourage this interest’, noted the Foreign Office, adding a warning: ‘I also assume that the Mexicans are under constant US pressure to adopt American reactor systems & desalination plant’.[23] ‘The Mexicans are, no doubt, turning to us’, he thought, because:

(i) they recognize that we have some expertise to offer and

(ii) they welcome the opportunity, when it presents itself, of dealing with someone other than the Americans.

Whether this will turn out to be very profitable for us it is difficult to say, but if the President puts his shoulder behind the project … we could conceivably find ourselves in on the ground floor’.[24]

Notes circulated between the UKAEA, the Foreign Office, the Overseas Development Ministry, and the British Embassy in Mexico City.

Aware that the Americans had ‘embarked on an intensive sales campaign to obtain responsibility for the survey and eventual contract’, Carrillo asked the British Embassy in confidence for ‘a UK team to go out before March 22^nd [1965] for some other ostensible reason but in fact to provide realistic and convincing background information on a possible UK imported reactor and desalination plant for [the Mexican] Minister of Finance’.[25] Two UKAEA scientists, Dr Hans Kronberger and F.M. Greenless were dispatched.

In April 1965 Dr Nabor Carrillo and his CNEN team visited London, meeting with the leading politician Barbara Castle. (the Parliamentary Secretary of the Overseas Development Ministry), as well as civil servants; Castle also had a private conversation with Edmund de Rothschild.[26]

De Rothschild’s presence marked the entry of French interests into the diplomatic competition over Texcoco. The suggestion of UK-France cooperation originated from Dr Bertrand Goldschmidt of the French atomic agency[27], and was brokered, via the Paris-based Baron Guy de Rothschild, by Goldschmidt’s brother-in-law Edmund de Rothschild, who worked at N M Rothschild & Sons in London.[28] Guy de Rothschild thought that the project ‘could only be financed by an international consortium’, and proposed a meeting of ‘British and French industrial and financial interests to explore the desirability of co-operation’.[29] Edmund relayed this message.

The Ministry of Technology, the UKAEA and the Board of Trade were unanimous that the UK ‘should firmly decline this offer’, for several reasons.[30] Unlike the supersonic Concord aircraft project, which was a development package in which both countries would learn from cooperation to mutual advantage, Texcoco presented the possibility of a ‘straight off-the-peg sale’. Second, these UK bodies thought ‘cooperation was technically nonsensical’ since the choice was either a British design (AGR being favoured) or French. It was thought the Mexicans, and Carrillo specifically, preferred the more advanced British design. Finally, a lot more than the initial sale income was at stake, indeed it might be strategically critical for an industrial commercial sector that was expected to grow in the atomic age:

the chance of securing the contract for this reactor (which would bring us in about £15 million) gave us the chance of beating the Americans to the first large reactor in a developing country. This would be a major breakthrough for our nuclear industry and could well lead to further orders in this vast potential market

Nevertheless, privately, the Foreign Office took a different view of cooperation with the French, one based on a perhaps more realistic, long-term assessment of the nation’s strengths in an emerging international market for nuclear power: ‘if you believe – as I do, but fear that [UK]AEA do not – that we shall only be able to hold our own in the long term against US competition in these fields if we broaden our base by cooperating with Europe in them, then it is at least arguable that the time to do so is now, when our acknowledged lead over other European countries should enable us to devise a system in which we retained the lion’s share’.[31]

President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz had confirmed that nuclear matters were the responsibility of the Mexican Ministry of Finance. The Mexican view was clearly that having an alternative to any American offer was useful for their negotiations with their northern neighbour. It mattered less whether it was British or French. Or indeed it could be both. The Foreign Office explained to Rothschild that the UK saw no advantage in cooperation, but might pursue it if the ‘Mexicans wish to “internationalise” their project’.[32] However, from the Mexican perspective there was no overriding reason to involve the French, since any non-US alternative sufficed.

Carrillo initially expressed clear preference for the UK option. But the Mexican decision was certainly not Carrillo’s alone. The Ministry of Finance had responsibility and, ultimately, nothing big happened in the Mexican political system without presidential approval. Some of these worries were aired within the Foreign Office:

if Presidential approval for it is forthcoming, then Carrillo would be happy enough to award the major contract to the United Kingdom. There are however many ifs. We are by no means convinced that an independent survey will support Carrillo’s solution, particularly since no one knows to what extent [the waters of] Texcoco Basin really are saline. We still do not know whether Carrillo will succeed in persuading other and more influential members of the Mexican Government of the necessity of a nuclear solution; and we fear that if a nuclear solution is adopted the US offer a reactor on gift terms will prove impossible to resist.[33]

Small nuclear research reactors had been part of US diplomacy since Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace. Large reactors for nuclear power might too be “gifted” if long-term interests, not least commercial interests, were served.

The Mexican government engaged a team of Mexican and American experts for a hydrological survey of Texcoco, including within it the leading Harvard soil mechanician Arthur Casagrande, and his brother Leo. Carrillo was allocated US$1 million for the survey.[34] The inclusion of the US experts was concerning for London, not least because the hydrological survey might ‘prove to be the first link in the chain of any project finally agreed for a reactor and desalination plant’.[35] But it was also noted that Carrillo had completed his PhD at Harvard and knew the Casagrandes well.

In the UK, Mexican ministers, government civil engineers and officials were wined, dined and given presentations through 1965, including a lunch given by Lord Snow (C.P. Snow, a minister in Harold Wilson’s Ministry of Technology) to discuss desalination. Meanwhile, UK atomic scientists, representatives of UK nuclear power station consortia, visited Mexico.[36]

Nevertheless, by September it was becoming clear to London that there were reasons to be worried. The Mexico City newspaper Excelsior reported an interview with Stewart Udall, the US Secretary of the Interior, in Tokyo. Udall, said the IAEA, at the request of the Mexican government had completed studies of a joint US-Mexican nuclear and desalination project. While not identifying the location explicitly, Udall was reported ‘to have mentioned that the US Government were informed about the problem of soil subsidence in Mexico City… [and] that a project to increase Mexico City’s water supplies could be subject of co-operation between the US and Mexico’.[37] While it seems Udall was talking about the Tijuana desalination – which actually increased Europeans’ chances, since European involvement in Texcoco would offset the American deal[38] – the scheme officials were right to worried.

A week of discussions in the fringes of a Desalination Symposium allowed time for an extensive conversation with the Mexican team. Present alongside the Mexicans and the Whitehall civil servants were Edmund de Rothschild, UKAEA scientists, Professor Silver, representatives of Weir Westgarth, and UK diplomats. As was reported by a British Embassy in Washington diplomat to a counterpart in the British Embassy in Mexico City, this conversation caused alarm bells to ring. It is worth quoting at length for what it reveals about different cultural expectations, the scale of the project, and the high stakes involved:

Our main object has been to try and discover whether this enormous project is only a pipe-dream of Carrillo’s or if there really is a likelihood that it will come off; and if so whether there is a role for the United Kingdom. I am not entirely confident of the answer to either question. Nothing is more difficult to read than the Mexican mind when not only technical considerations but foreign and internal politics are also involved. …

From our discussions on all this it was clear that Carrillo has until now greatly underestimated the immense complexity of a scheme of this kind, which would, if undertaken in its entirety, be the biggest in the world, and would pose problems that would tax the ingenuity of the world’s most sophisticated experts with experience in this field; this without even touching on the extraneous factors such as the need to rehouse anything up to ½ million people and perhaps eventually to move Mexico City International Airport. If we were talking about virtually any other developing country we could only conclude that the scheme is so huge and so little thought out that we could forget about it for the foreseeable future.

However all Mexican schemes seem to start in this muddled, haphazard and indeed exasperating manner, yet time and time again we have seen the pieces fall suddenly into place, a firm decision taken by the President, top priority given and unless one is very careful a contract lost before one ever fully realized that a possibility of one existed.[39]

In contrast, British ears would have pricked up hearing Diaz Ordaz’s Message to the Nation of 1 September 1965, as the President of Mexico, significantly, chose to address nuclear matters, starting with the role of CNEN and moving to hints at grand projects:

The work of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy is based on the will to favour and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

We desire that the development of our nuclear industry should rest on self-sufficiency in the supply of raw materials; that increasingly large groups of Mexicans should be trained for the direction and control of future installations; that the people should experience the benefits of this activity through agriculture, industry and medicine, and that we should be prepared from now on to use nuclear reactors to remedy the shortage of electric power and water.[40]

Ultimately though the project had little support in Mexico outside the CNEN, a fact that UKAEA gradually recognized. ‘the Texcoco pot will probably remain simmering for some time but without coming to the boil’.[41] For the choice of desalination plant, first in Tijuana but then for Texcoco, the second factor was immense American political lobbying, at the highest levels, and how it split the influencers at the top of the Mexican one-party political system. For example, it was the Foreign Office’s ‘information’ that

very great pressure us being put on the Mexicans – at President to President level – to ensure that all desalination business in Mexico – including the possible plant at Texcoco – should go to the US. This has reached the point at which politicians close to President Diaz Ordaz assume that the US will get its way. The technicians on the other hand look to the UK and would seek to frustrate this pressure if they can.[42]

Other alternatives to a nuclear reactor/desalination plant combination were available. Piping river water from a distance has already been mentioned; later oil-fired power station for desalination and biochemical treatment of sewage effluent were also possible.[43]

The third factor was the death of Dr Nabor Carrillo in February 1967.[44] This man, who had witnessed a nuclear detonation at Bikini atoll in 1946[45], and who had subsequently promoted the application of nuclear power to save Mexico City from collapse, was, at least as far as UK diplomats and scientists heard and saw, the firmest supporter in Mexico of choosing UK over North American suppliers of reactors and desalination plant.

Many years later, the remnants of Lake Texcoco were eventually memorialized as  Lake Nabor Carrillo, and Mexico’s nuclear institute is also named after him. In the 2010s Lake Nabor Carrillo was first drained to start building Mexico City’s new international airport, and then, as this project was cancelled, refilled to form an ecological park.[46]

Nuclear power never saved Mexico City, and the Carrillo’s Texcoco Project was never realised. In the late 1960s, the UK were still pitching an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor as Mexico considered its nuclear options elsewhere. In 1972 the Mexican government decided to accept US designs, and in 1976 construction began at Laguna Verde, on the Gulf coast, on two 654 MW(E) General Electric boiling-water reactors.[47] They are the only large nuclear power reactors in Mexico.

This has been a story of a grand hydraulic engineering vision conceived during the pinnacle years of nuclear optimism.  I found it because I was wondering about what links there might be between Mexico and the UK in the areas of scientific and technological collaboration and diplomacy. To be honest I had not expected to find much. Mexico is Spanish-speaking, a central American Republic, with little reason to prioritise relations with the UK. Yet because of its post-war strengths in nuclear power and desalination, and precisely because the United Kingdom was NOT the Unted States then a window for commerce opened.

There is still much we do not know. How seriously was the UK offer considered? How important were the exchanges between Mexican and US presidents? What would the public response have been to a large nuclear reactor built on the edge of Mexico City? It would be fascinating to see the view from other archives.

References

[1] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the UKAEA’s London office, 11 Charles II Street, at 3.30 pm on Tuesday, 2^nd February 1965’

[2] TNA FO 371/183321. Carrillo, from ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’.

[3] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the UKAEA’s London office, 11 Charles II Street, at 3.30 pm on Tuesday, 2^nd February 1965’

[4] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’. The Texcoco Project was described in a 1966 essay by one of Carrillo’s fellow engineers: Carlos Graef Fernandez, ‘The Texcoco Project’, in Post and Steele (eds.), Water Production Using Nuclear Energy, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966. Graef Fernandez’s essay has been noticed by present day promoters of nuclear solutions:  https://www.ans.org/news/article-2170/more-nuclear-for-mexico/ . See also: Natalia Verónica Soto-Coloballes, ‘Proyectos y obras para el use deo los terrenos desecados del antiguo Lago de Texcoco, 1912-1998’ (‘Projects abd construction work for using the dried lands of the former Lake Texcoco’, Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México (2019) 58, pp. 259-288.

[5] TNA AB 65/160. Telegram Kronberger to Sir Willliam Penney, 13 July 1964.

[6] ‘Technocrat’ is a politically-charged term in Mexico, see: Roderi Ai Camp, ‘The time of the technocrats and deconstruction of the revolution’, in William Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (eds.), The Oxford History of Mexico, 2010: ‘Few political themes in Mexico since the early 1970s have attracted more attention and provoked more discussion than the increasing role of technocrats and their influence on government policy and leadership trends, The rise of the technocratic politician is not, however – media interpretations to the contrary – a recent phenomenon. Its antecedents can be traced as far back as the 1940s…’. Carrillo is one such figure, I would suggest.

[7] Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Nuclear ontologies’, Constellations (13), No 3, 2006, pp. 320-331.

[8] John W. Sherman, ‘The Mexican “miracle” and its collapse’, in William Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (eds.), The Oxford History of Mexico, 2010.

[9] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964.

[10] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964. In 1957, it was reported that the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission wanted a 30 MW(E) atomic plant for the city of Chihuahua. In 1959 CNEN floated the idea of a 100 MW(E) station for Baja California. Others were even more speculative. One approach to UKAEA un 1959 by a Senor Geza Szekely of the Mexican firm PMEI, was assessed as “one of the growing pack of coyotes who thought they would obtain a handsome profit by acting as intermediaries in the purchase of an atomic power station”.

[11] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964.

[12] Sir John Cockcroft, director of Harwell, gave a series of three lectures in Mexico City too.

[13] TNA AB 65/160 contains correspondence discussing UK firms’ atomic supplies business in Mexico.

[14] TNA AB 65/160. Hildyard (British Embassy, Mexico City) to Thomas (UKAEA), 18 November 1963.

[15] TNA FO 371/183321. Carrillo, from ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’.

[16] TNA FO 371/183321. Hayes to Edmund de Rothschild, 28 May 1965.

[17] Silver visited Texcoco by helicopter in 1966, and provided a vivid description of landing ‘in a deserted portion of the lake … We dug a hole of about 4 feet diameter, and encountered water at 2 feet depth… The helicopter flight also revealed clearly the whole basin area, and the hill range which lies between it and Mexico City. It is presumed that the underground base of this range forms the impermeable curtain sealing off the two lakes from each other… I also made a tour of Mexico City and studied at first hand the very marked evidence of sinking, Again this is consistent completely with all the hypotheses on which Dr Carrillo’s theory is based. …The problem of subsidence is near disaster proportions and could become so any time. Hence not necessarily cheapest but the earliest possible solution must be found. For this reason I believe the balance will be on favour of nuclear desalination, even if the source waters are fresh’ TNA FO 371/189484. R.S. Silver, ‘Texcoco Project’, August 1966.

[18] TNA AB 65/160. Notes of a meeting at Weir Westgarth Ltd, 27 January 1965.

[19] There was also a smaller scheme in the Yucatan: a desalination plant to produce 40 tons of water a day for a naval station on the Isla de las Mujeres, near Cozumel, Quintana Roo. This was a few years before the immense tourist development began of Cancun.

[20] TNA 371/189484. Powell to Sir Nicholas Cheetham (UK Ambassador, Mexico City), 6 June 1966, records Weir Westgarth losing out to Westinghouse for a major contract in Kuwait, and the pressure and actions needed to influence Mexican desalination plant decisions

[21] TNA FO 371/183321. McLean (FO, Overseas Relations Branch) to Frost (Ministry of Overseas Development), 12 March 1965

[22] TNA FO 371/183321. Milward to MacKenzie, 24 September 1965 for grand canal information. For rest of Pearson’s biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetman_Pearson,_1st_Viscount_Cowdray . Also: ‘Pearson’s first major contract in Mexico involved the construction of a 30 mile Drainage Canal (Gran Canal del Desagüe) to the north of Mexico City to relieve the persistent (and perennial) problem of flooding in Mexico City. On the back of this notable success, in 1895, Pearson won the contract for the reconstruction and refurbishment of Veracruz, which since the beginning of the colonial era had been Mexico’s most important Atlantic port. Three years later, in 1898, Pearson won the most important, and certainly the most expensive contract ever awarded by a Mexican government since independence: the re-construction of the inter-oceanic railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico.’ https://hispanic-anglosphere.com/individuals/pearson-weetman-dickson-first-viscount-cowdray-1856-1927/ referencing Paul Garner, British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico 1889-1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)

[23] TNA FO 371/183321. Covering note on file, 16 February 1965.

[24] TNA FO 371/183321. Note by Rogers, 23 February 1965.

[25] TNA FO 371/183321. Telegram, McLean to Stephenson (scientific attaché,  British Embassy, Washington DC), undated (March 1965)

[26] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Record of a meeting with Dr Nabor Carrillo, of the Mexican Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN) April 21, 1965’. In Carrillo’s CNEN team were Tomas Gurza and Graes Fernandez.

[27] Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA). According to notes by Avnar Cohen for his oral history interview kept at the Wilson Center, ‘Goldschmidt headed the agency’s chemistry division for a decade, and later became a scientist-diplomat as head of the CEA’s “External Affairs” division’. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/bertrand-goldschmidt. French Who’s Who, gives 1959 as the start of his responsibility at CEA for ‘relations extérieures et des programmes’, and also adds that he was Représentant permanent de la France (1957-80) and then Président (1980) du conseil des gouverneurs at the l’Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique (the IAEA).

[28] The Foreign Office knew Bertrand Goldschmidt to be Edmund de Rothschild’s brother-in-law. Goldschmidt, who had been the only Frenchman employed on the Manhattan Project, was born 2 November 1912 and died aged 89 on 11 June 2002. He married Naomi de Rothschild (Edmund’s sister) in 1947. The London-based Edmund de Rothschild should not be confused with the French-Swiss banker Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild. See: https://www.rothschildarchive.org/genealogy/

[29] TNA FO 371/183321. Frost to Strachan, 6 May 1965. Guy de Rothschild, ‘Projet de construction a Mexico d’une installation de dessalement’, and ‘Note annexe’, undated, prepared by Guy for the banque Nationale pour la Commerce et l’Industrie

[30] TNA FO 371/183321. B.L. Strachan, ‘Nuclear reactor for Mexico’, 21 April 1965.

[31] TNA FO 371/183321. Note on file by Strachan, 7 May 1965.

[32] TNA FO 371/183321. Oram to E. de Rothschild, 22 April 1965. Later in the year it was hinted that an international option might be for the UK to supply the reactor and desalination plant and for the French to supply electrical generation equipment, as well as help, via the Rothschilds, arrange finance. TNA FO 371/183321. Robin Johnstone (First Secretary, British Embassy, Mexico) to Robert McAlpine (Counsellor, British Embassy, Mexico City), 11 October 1965.

[33] TNA FO 371/183321. J. McAdam Clark (Scientific Relations Department, Foreign Office) to  R.D.C. McAlpine (British Embassy, Mexico City), 14 June 1965. TNA AB 65/160. Telegram to Ministry of Overseas Development, 17 May 1965: : ‘CARILLO considers it quite likely Americans will offer to provide at least a nuclear reactor at their own expense for prestige purposes and Mexican Government would find such an offer difficult to refuse’

[34] The sum was allocated in a “non-accountable” way, ‘that is to say he has been told to get on with the job without having to seek the authorization of any governmental body for the expenditure involved’. TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965. Carrillo’s survey is mentioned (on p. 14) in a good longue durée study of the political ecology of Lake Texcoco, but does not mention its nuclear dimensions: Carolina Montero-Rosado, Enrique Ojeda-Trejo, Vicente Espinosa-Hernández, Demetrio Fernández-Reynoso,Miguel Caballero Deloya and Gerardo Sergio Benedicto Valdés, Historical Political Ecology in the Former Lake Texcoco: Hydrological Regulation’, Land (2023), 12(5), 1113, https://doi.org/10.3390/land12051113

[35] TNA FO 371/183321. MacLean to Hobbs, 2 August 1965.

[36] The consortia firms with an interest were The Nuclear Power Group, APC, English Electric, and B & W.

[37] TNA FO 371/183321. McAlpine to McAdam Clark, 28 September 1965.

[38] ‘the signature last week of the agreement between the United States and Mexico to undertake a joint survey in the North-West will almost certainly make it easier for Europeans to participate in Texcoco. Carrillo told us in confidence thar Sr. Gorostiza [President, CNEN] was not at all enthusiastic about co-opertaing with the Americans in frontier areas and Carrillo maintains that there will be stormy protests in political circles against the US/Mexico deal. In such a situation it would be true to form for the Mexican Government to seek a counter-weight and Carrillo thinks they may well choose Texcoco for this purpose’. TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965.

[39] TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965.

[40] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Translation of passage on nuclear energy in the Message to the Nation delivered by the President of Mexico on 1 September 1965’. Diaz Ordaz also mentioned discoveries of reserves of uranium, and the pursuit of the construction of a ‘Nuclear Centre of Mexico in the woods near the village of Salazar’.

[41] TNA FO 371/183321. MacLean (UKAEA) to McAdam Clark, 31 December 1965.

[42] TNA FO 371/183321. Note on file, 22 December 1985

[43] TNA AB 65/160. Cock, ‘Notes of a meeting at Weir Westgarth Ltd…’, 29 January 1965

[44] His role was taken up by Ing. Hiriart. TNA AB 65/555. Chicj to Kronberger, 28 July 1967.

[45] https://www.gob.mx/inin/es/articulos/dr-nabor-carrillo-flores-el-sabio-mexicano

[46] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/13/1067854/lake-texcoco-ancient-lake-unfinished-airport-mexico-city/

[47] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/mexico