76-10-B2

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Seabrook

Transcript We all want clean air, clean water, the beauty of nature preserved and, on the side, a place to live, to work and a certain amount of comfort. A great many people in the East were denied the latter this winter when fuel ran low, businesses closed and homes became frigid, unheated ice boxes. There can be no denying that excessive regulation of the energy industry set us up for the horrors of this, the coldest winter in a century. Recently, the Wall Street Journal recounted the problems of one utility company in trying to add to the available supply of energy. They named their story, "The Seabrook Scandal". Seabrook is the location picked by the Public Service Company of New Hampshire to build two nuclear power plants to provide power for all of New England. The company was given a go ahead by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction last summer. The approved design was for plants that would pump sea water into the cooling system and then back into the ocean through an elaborate tunnel. The environmental administration in the area declared the plants met Environmental Protection Agency standards. Everything looked fine at that point even though construction had been delayed two full years by the regulatory bureaucracy. Then the regional administrator reversed himself last November. This threw the problem to his superiors in Washington. So far they have made no decision. The hang up happens to be over whether harm will be done to some clam larvae. Since the Environmental Protection Agency won't give an answer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has now become doubtful about letting construction continue. The answer may be to scrap the tunnels and use cooling towers. This could mean having to find an entirely new plant location. In the meantime, while the bureaucrats do what bureaucrats do best, "hem and haw and stall", each month of delay costs the utility company fifteen million dollars. Not only does no one know what the answer will be -- they don't know when it will be. At fifteen million dollars a month that is heavy. With the right or common sense answer New England could be getting electrical power by 1981. That is more delay than is necessary, but if the decision is cooling towers, there is no way of knowing when, if ever, there will be power because it is possible that the plants can't be built at all. Already years have been spent getting the original permission. Then in good faith, Public Service Company started construction -- one hundred forty million dollars worth so far. Total investment is estimated at around six hundred million dollars. How much of that can be salvaged, if any, is anyone's guess - that is if the project must be called off. Once again we run into the economic mythology so prevalent that lets us think somehow a corporation absorbs and writes off a loss of this kind. First of all, what business can absorb six hundred million dollars in dead loss? The truth is, all of this will have to be recovered from future sales of electric power. Which means the people of New England will pay hundreds of millions of dollars more in utility bills just because some bureaucrats fumbled and stumbled. But we can spread the blame a little. It is doubtful there would have been the costly delays and reversed decisions if there had not been a radical fringe of the environmental movement determined to halt the development of nuclear power at any cost. Now as the Wall Street Journal says, they've learned they can kill off the generation of electric power simply by causing delays that make the costs prohibitive.		Details Batch Number 76-10-B2 Production Date 03/02/1977 Book/Page RPtV-127 Audio Youtube? No
		Added Notes Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant Of the 2 plants planned, only 1 was completed and it did not go only until 1990.