Understanding Government

A major windfall in federal funding offered to Florida for a new high speed rail effort, just might end up in America’s other sand-and-sun tourist destination — California.

Arguing that local matching funds and future operating and maintenance costs would be an albatross around Floridians’ necks, Florida’s Republican leadership recently rejected the $2.43 billion Washington offered for that state’s long planned fast train project. Now, according to Rich Connell of the Los Angeles Times, the race is on to get that money and California is hoping for a healthy slice, if not the whole pie. (more…)

With an emergency back up cooling system inadvertently disabled, Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was in a highly vulnerable condition for a year and a half, reports David R. Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle. In the event of an accident, the plant would have been unable to pump water to cool nuclear fuel rods — much the same problem as has struck the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan due to the earthquake and tsunami there.

The fault was corrected only after it was exposed during a drill. The incident, along with 13 others, is included in a report released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which reviewed plant inspections by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report lauds the NRC for catching and correcting problems, but criticizes the agency for failing to examine and fix the underlying systems or procedures that contributed to specific problems. (more…)

Two different reportorial and editorial approaches to the fraught question of fracking — one from Abrahm Lustgarten in ProPublica and one from Ian Urbina in the New York Times — together make it clear that the use of hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas is already a major threat to the environment across the entire country.   The federal government must react decisively both to protect the potential of natural gas as a path away from foreign oil dependence and to reduce the risks of fracking to the water we drink and the air we breathe. (more…)

In a strange but typical story, the EPA has announced an initiative to remove from drinking water such dangerous chemicals as perchlorate (a component of rocket fuel, explosives, and fireworks that causes birth defects).  But, as John Broder reports in the New York Times, deciding just how much perchlorate should be allowed in your water is going to take at least two more years, as the EPA

did not establish an actual limit on the amount of perchlorate allowable in drinking water, but set in motion a rulemaking process to set a standard.

The agency actually said it would be three or four years before the limit could be determined. (more…)