The New Hampshire Republican Party has released videos from a 1987 television program that they say shows former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D-Madbury) has changed her position on nuclear energy, videos the Shaheen campaign says were "taken out of context."

The videos show Shaheen debating former House Speaker Marshall Cobleigh on WMUR's Close-Up. At the time Shaheen was the campaign manager for Paul McEachern's gubernatorial campaign.

"These clips are over 20 years old and taken out of context," Kate Bedingfield, Shaheen's communications director, said in a statement.  "What Jeanne Shaheen has consistently said, including to Fosters a few weeks ago, is that nuclear power is a part of our energy mix - that is a fact. But we should not subsidize it and we should not expand it until we have a safe way to deal with the waste."

In one video Cobleigh said, "And if we don't have nuclear power in this country we are going to become more and more vulnerable to the Arabs in the mid east, and that's why we are in danger of war, because we are not taking care of our energy dependence."

To which Shaheen responded "that argument just doesn't wash."

"Today, Jeanne Shaheen has completely flip-flopped her position by claiming that she actually supports nuclear power and that it should be ‘part of the mix' in any plan to deal with our national energy crisis," New Hampshire Republican Chairman Fergus Cullen said in a press release. "With energy prices at record levels Shaheen has made yet another politically motivated, election year shift on a critical issue."

Bedingfield added that U.S. Sen. John Sununu (R-Waterville Valley), Shaheen's opponent, is supporting a "backward-looking policy that does nothing but pad Big Oil's profits will never get us to energy independence and it will continue to prevent us from creating 21st century jobs in New Hampshire."

One of the videos can be seen below and the rest can be viewed by reading the following press release: Shaheen's Nuclear Exposure