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, 39° 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.