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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."