Seabrook Plant Issue Hurts Tsongas Campaign

SEABROOK, N.H.--All was quiet yesterday on the windswept marshes that separate this tiny town's nuclear power plant from the Atlantic Ocean.

But that silence belies the years of angry and often uproarious debate that Seabrook Station has inspired since the state government announced its intention to construct the nuclear facility in 1968.

And that debate has caused considerable political fallout. In 1976, a Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter, a virtual unknown in New Hampshire, opposed the plant and gained enough votes from liberal anti-nuclear voters to win the primary by a narrow margin. In 1980, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54-'56 (D-Mass.) boosted his ultimately unsuccessful campaign by stealing the issue back from the incumbent president.

In 1988, even though every legal challenge to the plant had been exhausted, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis made his opposition to the plant a campaign issue and walked away with the nomination.

Here in Seabrook, telephone polls are adorned not only with political posters but with radiation detectors. Both Kennedy and Dukakis, fueled by public rage about locating a nuclear plant in such a populated area and near rich fishing waters, won overwhelming majorities here, according to town clerk Virginia Fowler.

While the politicians who opposed the plant have slowly died on the political vine, the facility survived. The plant went on line less than two years ago after withstanding 20 years of worth of legal challenges by the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition of citizens groups united against the station's installation.

It seemed as if Seabrook might be about to pass from political attention. But if this weekend is any indication, the plant can still produce an occassional political meltdown.

Silent on the issue of Seabrook and nuclear power, Democratic Candidate Tom Harkin used the plant as a backdrop for a Friday speech in which he denounced front runner and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas as a "Seabrook cheerleader."

Tsongas, who has opposed Seabrook but, unlike the other four major Democratic candidates, favors the limited use of nuclear power, attacked Harkin for negative campaigning. Former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown brought Seabrook up during a televised debate Sunday night, and by morning the plant was a conversation piece again.

Robert R. Cushing, a former state legislator from Seabrook, said the issue has not lost its importance for him. Cushing, who has been arrested "six or eight times" for trespassing at the plant, said he would vote for Harkin--and against Tsongas--because of their respective positions on nuclear power.

"[Tsongas's] position presumes that you're bound by a vision of society that is limited," said Cushing. "I think the problem with Tsongas...is that he doesn't understand the nexus between energy and the economy."

But not all Seabrook opponents are shying away from Tsongas.

Dudley W. Dudley, an executive councillor and adviser to the New Hampshire governor's office for eight years, has also hoped over the fence surrounding Seabrook Station. But she says she will vote for the former Massachusetts senator.

"I guess, to a certain extent, I do believe reluctantly that we're going to have some form of nuclear power," said Dudley, a Durham resident.

Other Seabrook residents say they are more worried by New Hampshire's troubled economy than by the nuclear plant.

"There are a few people who will always be against nuclear power," said Glen French, 48, the president of the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Hampton Beach. "But [Seabrook Station] has been subjected to all the safety precautions that a power plant can be subjected to."

"If you were to say the issue is nuclear power, you'd be wrong," said French, an Independent who said he has not decided whether he will vote in the Republican or the Democratic primary today. "Tsongas is the only one who's touched upon it. It's that we need an energy policy."

"The people who have been here all their lives have no problem with Seabrook," said one 71-year-old woman as she walked her dog just a mile away from the plant. "It doesn't bother us any more in the least."

But, with rumors circulating that Seabrook Station is losing money and that officials are running out of time to find a permanent home for the plant's waste--a point that even the plant's spokesperson concedes, some residents speculate that the plant could become a political issue once again.

"It is a national symbol of a failed energy policy and a failed energy technology," said Cushing.