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In 2008, Californians approved a high-speed rail project that has become one of the largest infrastructure projects in the nation. The dream of taking a train from Southern California to San Francisco in about three hours is chugging along, but facing new barriers. The original plan voters opted for in 2008 was titled the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century. When voters approved the measure, the estimated cost of the project was $40 billion. The 2016 business plan reviewed by the Legislative Analysts Office estimated a cost of $64 billion. WHAT IT WOULD TAKE TO...

Could Donald Trump be the president who brings high-speed rail to America? The Obama administration spent nearly $10 billion to improve passenger rail service across the country. While it accomplished that goal to some degree, it did not build the faster trains passengers can ride in Europe, Japan and China. Trains in other countries can travel 200 mph or more, but no train in the United States as yet travels faster than 150 mph. Most go much more slowly than that. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion investment in U.S. infrastructure, and he has expressed interest in improving roads, bridges,...

California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more. And that’s just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis, obtained by The Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter, just north of Bakersfield, could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion. The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning,...

California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more. And that’s just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis, obtained by The Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion. The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning, lags in processing invoices...

For the second time in two months, The Navy's new $4 billion stealth warship has broken down. As Military.com reports, the ripped-from-the-pages-of-a-sci-fi mag-looking USS Zumwalt is now in Panama for repairs after suffering a breakdown while passing through the Panama Canal on Monday evening.Military.com's Hope Hodge Seck reports that a spokesman for U.S. 3rd Fleet, Cmdr. Ryan Perry, told Military.com that the commander of 3rd Fleet, Vice Adm. Nora Tyson, had instructed the USS Zumwalt, the first in a new class of stealthy destroyers, to remain at ex-Naval Station Rodman in Panama to address the engineering casualty. "The timeline for...

BATH, Maine — The Bath-built USS Zumwalt, the first-in-class “stealth” destroyer that left the Bath shipyard on Sept. 7, broke down Monday night while passing through the Panama Canal and was towed by tugs through the locks toward the Pacific Ocean. The DDG 1000, the first of a class of three destroyers that cost an estimated $22 billion combined, “suffered an engineering casualty,” the Navy Times reported. The Zumwalt was towed through the locks to Rodman, a former U.S. military base.

Just three weeks after commissioning the USS Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy has admitted it is canceling ammunition specially developed for the ship's high-tech gun systems because the rounds are too expensive. . The guns, tailor made for the destroyer, will be unable to fire until the Navy chooses a cheaper replacement round. The Zumwalt-class destroyers were conceived in the late 1990s as the first of a new generation of stealthy warships. The radar signature of the 610 foot long warship is that of a 50-foot fishing boat, making the Zumwalts great for getting in close to an enemy coastline and...

The U.S. Navy’s new high tech destroyer has been sidelined for repairs after suffering a seawater leak in its propulsion system less than a month before its expected commissioning.

As its economy started to recover in 2010, progressives began to hail California as a kind of Scandinavia on the Pacific — a place where liberal programs also produce prosperity. The state’s recovery has won plaudits from such respected figures as The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Gov. Jerry Brown, in Bill Maher’s assessment, “took a broken state and fixed it.” There’s a political lesson being injected here, as well, as blue organs like The New Yorker describe California as doing far better economically than nasty red-state Texas. But if you take a look...

<p>The largest and most expensive destroyer ever built for the U.S. Navy once headed to sea in a snowstorm during builder trials. Now, it's heading into the remnants of a tropical storm as it leaves Maine for good.</p> <p>The skipper is watching the weather as the stealthy Zumwalt destroyer prepares to depart from Bath Iron Works on Wednesday en route to its commissioning in Baltimore, and then to its homeport in San Diego.</p>

I have long been a believer that, in most cases, a private company will do a more effective and efficient job than any government agency charged with the same task. My recent travel experience solidified that belief. It all started out with a half-empty water bottle at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside the District of Columbia. I had checked in the night before, checked my bag at the curbside when I arrived, and now had a full hour to go through security. With Congress gone since late July and much of the District emptied out until Labor Day, I...

The ITER fusion reactor will fire up for the first time in December 2025, the €18-billion project’s governing council confirmed today. The date for “first plasma” is 5 years later than under the old schedule, and to get there the council is asking the project partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—to cough up an extra €4 billion ($4.5 billion). “It is expected, if there are no objections, that we can approve [the schedule] by November and then we can move forward,” says ITER director general Bernard Bigot. ITER aims to show that it...

The linchpin of California's climate change agenda, a program known as cap and trade, has become mired in legal, financial and political troubles that threaten to derail the state's plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The program has been a symbol of the state's leadership in the fight against global warming and a key source of funding, most notably for the high-speed rail project connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the legality of cap and trade is being challenged in court by a business group, and questions are growing about whether state law allows it to operate past 2020....

Jerry Brown’s dream of constructing a high speed rail line connecting the Bay Area with Southern California suffered a major setback this week, but rest assured every effort is being made to spend enough money quickly enough to make pulling the plug seem unreasonable. Construction costs of the project have escalated so rapidly since the times state voters narrowly approved a bond issue that instead of constructing new tracks in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the trains will share existing tracks with conventional freight and commuter trains, drastically increasing travel time, and making the trains half-fast at best. But...

The latest auction in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project. The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million. Whatever prompted the lack of buyers, the auction is a stark example of the uncertainty and risk of relying on actively-traded carbon credits to build the bullet train. The...

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System located near the California-Nevada border, burst into flames when some of the thousands of mirrors that focus sunlight on water towers became misalinged and started an electrical cable fire. The plant was built with a $1.6 billion taxpayer guaranteed loan and is run by a consortium of companies that include BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google. Associated Press: Firefighters had to climb some 300 feet up a boiler tower at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California after fire was reported on an upper level around 9:30 a.m., fire officials said. The plant...

General Dynamics Bath Iron Works delivered the first Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer to the Navy on Friday, Naval Sea Systems Command announced. The delivery of the 16,000-ton Zumwalt (DDG-1000) optimized for stealth and operations close to shore follows last month’s successful acceptance trials of the ship overseen by the service’s Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV), Navy officials told USNI News. INSURV evaluated the ship’s hull, mechanical and engineering (HM&E) systems during the underway testing period last month. “Zumwalt’s crew has diligently trained for months in preparation of this day and they are ready and excited to take charge of...

High-speed rail is turning out to be a slow-speed proposition. The first segment of California’s first-in-the-nation bullet-train project, currently scheduled for completion in 2018, will not be done until the end of 2022, according to a contract revision the Obama administration quietly approved this morning. That initial 119-mile segment through the relatively flat and empty Central Valley was considered the easiest-to-build stretch of a planned $64 billion line, which is eventually supposed to zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. So the four-year delay is sure to spark new doubts about whether the state’s—and perhaps...

BATH, Maine (AP) — The U.S. Navy is ready to take ownership of the Zumwalt, its largest and most technologically sophisticated destroyer. Sailors' uniforms and personal effects, supplies and spare parts are being moved aboard the 610-foot warship in anticipation of crew members taking on their new charge, said Capt. James Kirk, the destroyer's skipper. The Zumbalt is the first new class of warship built at Bath Iron Works since the Arleigh Burke slid into the Kennebec River in 1989. The shipyard is expected to turn the destroyer over to the Navy this week. "We've overcome lots of obstacles to...

Some of the smallest surface combatants in the U.S. Navy will be getting new missiles with "over the horizon" capabilities. The effort is part of a program to give the troubled Littoral Combat Ship program a major firepower boost. The Navy has announced that the USS Freedom, one of two types of the so-called Littoral Combat Ship, will be outfitted with the Norwegian-designed Naval Strike Missile. The missile will be ready for the Freedom's next deployment, whereupon it will be evaluated with an eye for fleet-wide adoption. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, originally designed to provide a multi-mission ship...