Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant

That cluster of containment domes and cooling towers on the New Hampshire coast is Seabrook Station, one of the most contested nuclear power plants in American history, and a landmark that shaped the modern anti-nuclear movement.

Public Service Company of New Hampshire proposed Seabrook in the early nineteen seventies, planning two reactors at a projected cost of just under one billion dollars. What followed was a financial and political catastrophe stretched across nearly two decades.

The opposition coalesced around a coalition called the Clamshell Alliance, named for fears that the plant's heated water discharge would devastate local shellfish. On August first, nineteen seventy-six, organizers staged the first nonviolent mass protest at the construction site. The following spring, on May first, nineteen seventy-seven, more than two thousand demonstrators occupied the site and refused to leave. Fourteen hundred and fourteen of them were arrested, making it one of the largest mass arrests in American history up to that point. Protestors carried signs reading "Split Wood, Not Atoms" and "Go Fishing, Not Fission." National television carried the images. Seabrook became a rallying symbol for the American anti-nuclear movement just as Three Mile Island, two years later, was about to deepen public fear of reactor safety.

Costs spiraled to nine billion dollars for both planned units. In January of nineteen eighty-eight, the Public Service Company of New Hampshire filed for bankruptcy, the first investor-owned utility in the country to do so since the Great Depression. The second reactor was cancelled outright. Unit One finally received its operating license and began generating power in nineteen ninety, fourteen years after construction started.

Seabrook's license was extended in twenty nineteen to run through twenty fifty. The protests that once defined this coastline are quiet now, but the plant itself still hums on, a concrete monument to the nuclear debate that never quite resolved itself.