Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Seabrook: A Case Study In Mismanagement, Irvin C. Bupp

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Seabrook nuclear power plant construction project is an unqualified financial disaster. It simultaneously threatens its chief owner, the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire (PSNH) with bankruptcy and the company's electricity customers with huge rate increases. The fifteen-year history of the project is reviewed to identify "what went wrong?"

The review suggests that the basic problem has been mismanagement by both PSNH and by government regulators. A three-year regulatory imbroglio over the environmental effects of the plant's cooling system was extremely costly in the mid-1970s.

By the time this problem was belatedly resolved, the project had begun to outstrip …