The Endless Seabrook Saga

A nuclear plant that has everybody powerless

Protesters staging mass demonstrations against a nuclear plant in a New Hampshire town. Conservative Governor Meldrim Thomson and his state troopers arresting some 1,500 of them. Power company officials warning that in the end the public will suffer by paying unnecessarily high electricity rates.

For five years this controversy has swirled around the coastal community of Seabrook (pop. 5,300), with the fortunes of battle favoring first one side, then the other. At issue is a $2.3 billion nuclear power plant that New England power companies, led by Public Service Co. of New Hampshire, insist must be built to satisfy the region's growing electricity needs. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has now ordered that plant construction be suspended by July 21, thus awarding a temporary victory to the anti-nuclear forces, particularly their noisiest wing, the Clamshell Alliance. The alliance has mustered up to 18,000 protesters in four demonstrations at the site, and a Clamshell spokesman proclaimed the stop-work order to be "the beginning of the end of nuclear power in this country." Governor Thomson termed the decision "asinine."

Yet, despite all the noise they have made, neither the Governor nor the Clamshellers have actually influenced the stop-and-go course of construction at the site. Surprisingly, both sides agree on the villains' identity: bungling federal bureaucracies whose errors and capriciousness have kept key issues from being resolved. Says Carl Goldstein, a spokesman for the pro-plant Atomic Industrial Forum: "It is horrendous what Seabrook shows about the regulatory process." Agrees Tony Roisman, an opposing lawyer: "You can't regulate this way."

The plant's construction design made the project vulnerable to controversy from the start because the power company planned to cool its twin 1,150-megawatt nuclear reactors by drawing sea water from three miles offshore through a 19-ft.-diameter tunnel, and returning the water, 39DEG F. hotter, to the ocean. The issue was supposed to have been settled in 1974, when the Environmental Protection Agency required that all new nuclear plants use concrete cooling towers, which dissipate the heat through evaporation and may cost more than $60 million.

The first difficulty arose in 1975 when the EPA decided to make Seabrook an exception to the rule. NRC, which holds final licensing power, issued a preliminary permit in 1976. This was done even though Government scientists had not fully studied the likely consequences of seawater cooling, which environmentalists claim is harmful to sea life. The utilities rushed to begin construction; the companies have now spent $400 million on the project, on the theory that the more they build, the harder the plant will be to stop. Meanwhile, company lawyers sought a permanent exemption from the cooling-tower requirement. This involved nine months of public hearings and deliberation by the EPA'S Boston regional office. Finally, in November 1976, EPA Regional Administrator John McGlennon ruled that the ocean tunnel design was a potential environmental danger. His decision voided the construction permit, and work stopped in January 1977.

The utilities took their case to a new EPA administrator, Douglas Costle. He ignored an EPA study, made just before he took office, in which three experts from outside the agency concurred with McGlennon's decision. Costle convened a new panel, drawn entirely from within the agency. This panel said McGlennon had been wrong. Costle agreed, and so did NRC, which reinstated the construction permit. Work resumed at Seabrook.

Watching EPA's confusion, NRC next ordered that hearings on the cooling system be held and that the companies study other possible sites. The NRC warned the builders that they might be wasting money if seawater cooling was finally disapproved. Ignoring NRC, the Public Service Co. speeded up work at Seabrook.

Then the New Hampshire Audubon Society and the Seacoast Antipollution League challenged Commissioner Costle's decision in court and won a ruling in February that EPA had acted illegally in not permitting outsiders to cross-examine its panel and in not including nonagency experts on the panel.

The result of all these decisions against the plant set up a confusing double track of new proceedings by both EPA and NRC. As required, hearings were held in Manchester, N.H., by NRC on alternate sites and by EPA on the seawater cooling system. Construction work nevertheless continued full blast at Seabrook.

Stung by accusations of needless delay, the NRC board in Washington ruled, 2 to 1, that construction must stop by July 21. It cannot resume, the majority said, until EPA finally decides whether seawater cooling is permissible. At Seabrook, where the plant is now about 15% complete, some 2,200 laborers rushed to get as much work as possible done before the stop order goes into effect.

EPA Administrator Costle must now read several thousand pages of testimony and make a new decision. Since he may have erred through haste last time, he is not expected to be finished before August or perhaps September. Even then, plant foes or friends can appeal his decision in court. Concedes the NRC staff, in an analysis of Seabrook: "This case is a serious failure of governmental process, a paradigm of... a system strangling itself in red tape."

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