Morning headlines: Impact fee update, permit fees in West Virginia, and tritium leaks at nuclear plants

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

June 21, 2011 | 11:03 AM

Good morning –
No new details on budget negotiations – or whether an impact fee will be part of this year’s spending agreement. Yesterday’s big news was Governor Corbett’s threat to veto a fiscal code, (Capitolwire: $) if it contains fee language. He wants the fee discussion to wait until after his Marcellus Shale Commission issues its July 22 report.
On the subject of local impacts, the Marcellus Shale Coalition wants you to know their companies have “invested more than $411 million over the past three years to repave, rebuild and improve roadways and transportation infrastructure across the state of Pennsylvania, according to a survey of participating members. Since 2008, approximately 21% of the payments have been made toward local roads, while approximately 79% went toward improving roads maintained by the state.
Meantime, West Virginia lawmakers are debating new permit fees for natural gas drillers. The state already has a severance tax in place.
On the subject of nuclear energy, the Associated Press has just released a year-long investigation showing “radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping.” The article includes a section on Exelon, which operates Montgomery County’s Limerick Generating Station, York County’s Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, and Three Mile Island in Dauphin County.

“To Exelon – the country’s biggest nuclear operator, with 17 units – piping problems are just a fact of life. At a meeting with regulators in 2009, representatives of Exelon acknowledged that “100 percent verification of piping integrity is not practical,” according to a copy of its presentation.”

In 2009, 123,000 picocuries per liter of tritium were detected in an on-site well at Peach Bottom. That’s “six times the drinking water standard,” according to the report.