Goverment Regulations

This is a continuation that another student and I had about government regulations, such as the EPA.

The other student stated their hatred for the government having the right to enter a place of business and than shutting them down because they failed to meet federal guidelines. They said it was a large waste of money and time by the government in meddling in someone else's business.

While I understand why they think this way, I don't understand why they think this is a bad thing. We have the EPA mandates for a reason: To protect the public. They were set fourth to keep business from creating waste and pollutants without having any responsibility. The example I explained to this student was the nuclear power plant that was to be constructed here in Indiana; Marble Hill.

Marble Hill was a nuclear plant that started construction in 1977 with an initial cost of $1.4 billion. on March 29, 1979, there was a nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. With this accident, the public became afraid of nuclear power. Federal regulations changed the construction requirements for Marble Hill to help ease public fears and to make sure the same accident couldn't happen again. These new guidelines changed what type of concrete and how think the reactor vessels could be in addition to having multiple new safety features that had to be added, features that were learned of the accident on Three Mile Island.

In June 0f 1984, after 7 years of construction and $2.5 billion spent, the facility was only 40% complete. With an estimate to finish the facility at $7.1 billion, the construction project was terminated. This figure was due to new EPA standards required of power plants and the NRC's requirements of the facility.

Imagine if the facility were to be finished without any of these new safety features and without having any sort of regulation. If it were to have an accident, countless lives would be lost as well as the area of property damage. The public would be demanding of the government to have done something before the disaster happened.

This is why there are regulations in place. These regulations were not thought of as just something to make it tough to run a business. All the regulations that we have now came AFTER a disaster happened and were put in place to help keep the same disaster from happening again. An example of this is now every ship must carry lifeboats for everyone on board after the sinking of the Titanic.

I for one am glad that the government has set forth regulations. It's just something that needs to be monitored and to make sure the regulators actually do the safe thing when the time comes and shuts down a business when guidelines are not followed rather than just accept a fine and allow the process to continue. This is what happened with BP and what led up to the great oil spill in the Gulf.