The Center for Public Integrity

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Exploding freight cars full of ethanol made for a dramatic early morning scene in Ohio's capital on Wednesday, but officials said the train derailment that led to a hurried evacuation of an urban neighborhood could have been much worse.

The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a 12-person team to investigate the derailment on the Norfolk Southern Corp. tracks, which led to spectacular explosions and the burning of three tank cars each carrying 30,000 gallons of ethanol. Nobody aboard the train was injured.

The NTSB expects to issue a preliminary report on the derailment in a month. The full investigation could take a year.

Officials said they don't know yet what caused the accident, which occurred at around 2 a.m. in an industrial area near Interstate 71, north of downtown. The explosions were felt for blocks and sent flames shooting high in the air.

NTSB board member Earl F. Weener said Wednesday night that the tankers are still burning. He said once they cool down, a chemical foam will be sprayed on them to prevent re-igniting and the remaining ethanol will be removed.

Two people were injured while walking on the tracks to investigate when a second explosion occurred. Officials said they went to the hospital themselves with minor injuries.

Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, who later Wednesday visited a temporary Red Cross shelter set up for evacuees, said the accident could have been worse if it had occurred in an area where more people lived.

"I'm grateful, in one respect as well, that this did not occur in a more populated area near more residents," he said. "It very well could have. A mile up or a mile south. North or south, east or west. It could have been tragic in other ways as well."

Q: How many nuclear plants are under construction in the U.S.?

A: Three. Two nuclear reactors are being built at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia. Two more reactors are under construction at Plant Summer in central South Carolina. A fifth reactor mothballed in 1985 is being finished at Plant Watts Bar in Tennessee.

Q: How often are nuclear plants built?

A: The last nuclear plant built in the United States was the existing reactor finished at Watts Bar in 1996.

Q: How much does a nuclear plant cost?

A: Billions of dollars. Nuclear plants are among the most complicated and expensive infrastructure projects in the world. The plants require incredible amounts of design and engineering work and must be built to exacting safety standards. Federal inspectors can require that parts of the plant be ripped out and replaced if they don't meet muster. The plants require huge amounts of metal, concrete, cables and wires. Building two Westinghouse Electric Co. AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle is supposed to cost roughly $14 billion, though the final expenses could be more.

Q: How does that compare with building coal- or gas-powered plants?

A: Nuclear plants are far pricier to build than are gas- or coal-fired power plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for instance, spent $790 million to build a gas-fired plant that opened last month in northeast Tennessee. Analysts and energy companies say nuclear plants can be cheaper to operate in the long run.

Q: Why do building costs matter to customers?

A: Because customers ultimately pay for the construction costs as part of their monthly power bills. The more a plant costs, the more customers will pay.

Q: Are any projects over budget right now?

ATLANTA (AP) — America's first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry's hopes for a jumpstart to the nation's new nuclear age.

Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings.

Those problems, along with jangled nerves from last year's meltdown in Japan and the lure of cheap natural gas, could discourage utilities from sinking cash into new reactors, experts said. The building slowdown would be another blow to the so-called nuclear renaissance, a drive over the past decade to build 30 new reactors to meet the country's growing power needs. Industry watchers now say that only a handful will be built this decade.

"People are looking at these things very carefully," said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inexpensive gas alone, he said, "is casting a pretty long shadow over the prospects" for construction of new nuclear plants.

The AP's review of pending projects found:

— Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia, initially estimated to cost $14 billion, has run into over $800 million in extra charges related to licensing delays. A state monitor has said bluntly that co-owner Southern Co. can't stick to its budget. The plant, whose first reactor was supposed to be operational by April 2016, is now delayed seven months.

DETROIT (AP) — A Canadian company's failure to deal adequately with cracks in an oil pipeline and its slow response to a 2010 rupture in southwestern Michigan likely caused the most expensive onshore oil spill in U.S. history, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.

Enbridge Inc. knew in 2005 that its pipeline near Marshall, a city 95 miles west of Detroit, was cracked and corroded, but it didn't perform excavations that ultimately might have prevented the rupture, NTSB investigators told the five-member board at a meeting in Washington.

Investigators also faulted Enbridge control center personnel for twice pumping more oil into the line after the spill began and failing to discover what had happened for more than 17 hours, when an employee of a natural gas company notified them.

The board voted to approve the findings and 19 recommendations for safety improvements after testimony concluded.

The NTSB doesn't have the power to regulate pipeline companies, but its safety recommendations carry significant weight with lawmakers, federal and state regulators, and industry officials. Results of its investigations sometimes are used in lawsuits.

The spill dumped about 843,000 gallons of heavy crude into the Kalamazoo River and a tributary creek, fouling more than 35 miles of waterways and wetlands. About 320 people reported symptoms from crude oil exposure.

Enbridge's cleanup costs have exceeded $800 million, which NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said was more than five times greater than the next-costliest onshore spill — a 2005 release of 991,788 gallons by Chevron Pipeline Co. That cleanup cost $150 million.

NEW YORK (AP) — Last year brought a record heat wave to Texas, massive floods in Bangkok and an unusually warm November in England. How much has global warming boosted the chances of events like that?

Quite a lot in Texas and England, but apparently not at all in Bangkok, say new analyses released Tuesday.

Scientists can't blame any single weather event on global warming, but they can assess how climate change has altered the odds of such events happening, Tom Peterson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told reporters in a briefing. He's an editor of a report that includes the analyses published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

In the Texas analysis, researchers at Oregon State University and in England noted that the state suffered through record heat last year. It happened during a La Nina weather pattern, the flip side of El Nino. Caused by the cooling of the central Pacific Ocean, La Nina generally cools global temperatures but would be expected to make the southern United States warmer and drier than usual. But beyond that, the scientists wondered, would global warming affect the chances of such an event happening?

To find out, they studied computer climate simulations for La Nina years, focusing on Texas. They compared the outcome of three such years in the 1960s with that of 2008. They used 2008 because their deadline for the study didn't allow enough time to generate thousands of new simulations with fresh data from 2011. The two years were similar in having a La Nina and in amounts of greenhouse gases in the air.

The idea of the study, they said, was to check the likelihood of such a heat wave both before and after there was a lot of man-made climate change, which is primarily from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil.