Our Costly Nuclear Follies, From Seabrook to San Luis Obispo : Atom Power: Can we avoid staggering overruns on such projects as Diablo Canyon, which cost billions more than estimates? Yes: Tell the truth.

As the last skirmishes die in court, the Seabrook, N.H., nuclear power plant is close to being turned on. Its construction and licensing took 18 bitter years of protest, lawsuits, plummeting bond ratings and finally the bankruptcy of its major owner, the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire. Originally estimated at $500 million in 1968, the plant by now has cost $6.45 billion--and counting.

Seabrook is not the only nuclear plant--or the only major construction project--to experience staggering cost overruns. The two Diablo Canyon nuclear plants in San Luis Obispo were scheduled to cost $350 million; they totalled $5.5 billion when they started up in 1985. The Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, N.Y., was first proposed in 1966 at a cost of $75 million. It finally cost $5.7 billion to build, and will never operate.

To take an example of another sort, the trash-to-energy incinerator where my garbage wends its humble way each week was estimated in 1982 to cost $17 per ton incinerated. This year my town will pay $111 per ton for its services.

Massive cost overruns like these are not isolated phenomena. They occur so regularly and systematically that they should come as no surprise. They happen with incinerators, dams, highways, large power plants--any project that provokes significant public opposition. In industrial quarters it is taken as simple truth that the cost overruns are due to the senseless harassment of environmentalists. Environmentalists know with equal certainty that the fault lies with industry’s shortsightedness and arrogance. The overruns are greatest in the nuclear industry, they would say, because that industry is the most shortsighted and arrogant of all.

Both arguments are self-serving, both are exaggerated--and both are partly right. Citizen obstinacy and industrial myopia work together to create spiraling costs--costs not only in money but in social cohesion.

Seabrook is a classic example of this spiral. Here’s how it works:

1) The proponents of a project vastly underestimate its cost, partly because they want to sell the project, partly because they are blind to many real costs, especially environmental costs. Nor do they account for the time and effort it takes to persuade (as opposed to brainwash) the public to accept a project--or to change the project so that it becomes acceptable.

2) A go-ahead decision is made, usually by a small group of officials, on the basis of incomplete information. At this stage the public is only dimly aware of the project. That fact is already a sign of mismanagement.

3) Land acquisitions begin, bulldozers move and the people wake up--starting with those who live across the street. Puzzled citizens turn angry as they learn what has been planned without their involvement. In order to stop the desecration of their neighborhood (usually the only motivation at first), they invoke higher environmental concerns to threaten a larger community. That brings in more opponents.

4) As intervenors begin to insist on safeguards and environmental protection, officials stonewall. They deny that such measures are at all necessary. (A favorite argument of Seabrook proponents has been that an evacuation plan is not important because the plant will never have an accident.) The public persists, industry resists, both sides distort truth. This is the time when someone goes to court and expenses begin to mount.

5) Lawyers, bureaucrats and expert studies eat up money. Worse, they eat up time with the interest-clock ticking. Interest is the primary ballooner of costs, especially when the project is funded by high-interest junk bonds, as Seabrook largely was. The more delays, the more doubt that the project can succeed, the more debt piles up, the higher the interest rate on the next borrowing. Cost-inflation goes into runaway mode. In the early 1980s, the Harvard Business School regularly used Seabrook as a case study, asking students to predict when the plant would drive its owners bankrupt.

6) With opponents locked eyeball to eyeball, the real environmental risks of the project may be revealed by a spectacular disaster somewhere else (such as Chernobyl). Regulations are tightened, new precautions are mandated (such as evacuation plans). Industry complains that regulators are changing the rules in the middle of the game--which they are. But in truth the original rules have been revealed as insufficient for public protection. Intervenors, still trying to kill the project altogether, seize this opportunity to press for new regulations that are impossibly stringent.

So it goes, round after round--citizen action, industry resistance, bureaucratic procedures, higher interest. All the participants except the intervenors are well paid--which makes it particularly unjust to blame environmentalists alone for the spiraling costs. They play their role, but often at great cost to themselves. Others are fighting for profits or power; citizen intervenors are fighting for their homes, their neighborhoods, the health of their children, the integrity of nature.

The result is a project, or a killed project, costing far more than it would have cost to do the project right, or kill it, in the first place. The result is also a divided community, each side blaming the other for the mess everyone has created together. Furthermore, seasoned and skilled troops of warriors have been formed on both sides; in the manner of all warriors, they go off to find new battles. One reason the Seabrook battle was particularly protracted was that it came late and attracted combatants who already had years of practice promoting, or opposing, nuclear plants elsewhere.

Is there any way to stop this unnecessary squandering of time, dollars, effort and communities? The only one I can see is to tell the truth about a project from the beginning, to include community and environmental considerations right away, to respect and involve the public and to be willing to pay full costs, including costs of environmental protection.

Doing all that might stop the project before it ever gets started, you say.

It might indeed, which is better than stopping it after billions are invested.

Even if the project goes, you say, all those preparations and precautions will be outrageously expensive.

Yes, they will. They will bring the cost of the project up somewhere near its actual cost to society. But that cost will not be nearly so high as the cost of denial, public opposition, litigation, delay and lasting bitterness.