Clamshell's first shot over the bow

RYE, N.H. -- On the porch of his Rye farmhouse, Guy Chichester looked at his backyard, where antinuclear activists first met and formed the Clamshell Alliance in 1976. Chichester, a lanky Long Island native and retired carpenter, is now 72, but his feelings about the Seabrook plant haven't changed since the early 1970s.

"It's much too dangerous for us to have here, and I wouldn't have wanted it here even if they gave" the energy "to us for free," said Chichester.

Chichester first heard about the Seabrook proposal in 1973, when he led a grass-roots coalition that helped defeat a plan by Aristotle Onassis, who wanted to build an oil refinery at nearby Durham Point. During one of the meetings of the group -- dubbed the People's Energy Project -- a neighbor stood up at Rye Junior High and asked what they were going to do about the proposed Seabrook nuclear plant.

Chichester saw the plant as a threat to the environment, and his fledgling alliance started leafleting people outside of banks in Manchester, Portsmouth, Durham, and Newington, which were lending money to the plant's builder, Public Service Co. of New Hampshire. By January 1976, he helped plan the first occupation of the site, and along with Renny Cushing and Ron Rieck, an apple picker from Weare, erected a small platform on the top of a 100-foot -high-weather antenna at the Seabrook site.

Rieck stayed up there for more than three nights that month. "That was kind of the first shot," Chichester said.

STEVEN ROSENBERG