"Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said Tuesday the agency wasn't on pace to meet its own timeline for improving safety at U.S. nuclear plants in response to the meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant a year ago."

"The NRC will soon issue its first orders in response to the Fukushima accident, but it is also weighing a host of regulatory changes that could impose extra costs on the operators of the 104 reactors in the U.S."

[2]

"Senate Republicans' push for a vote on approval of the delayed $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline project gained momentum on Tuesday after Democrats failed to end debate on a major transportation bill.

Fifty-two senators, most of them Democrats, voted to move forward on the $160 billion highway bill without a proposed Republican amendment to authorize construction of the Canada-to-Texas pipeline, eight votes short of the 60 needed to end debate.

"An environmental scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has resigned from the expert advisory committee intended to guide the US National Children’s Study (NCS), charging that the goals of the massive study, which aims to track factors affecting the health of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21, have been 'significantly abrogated' by its managers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."

"In large sections of America's farmland, new strains of weeds are making life miserable for farmers. They've developed resistance to the country's No. 1 weedkiller, Roundup. Now farmers face a choice: Do they go for yet another kill-all-the-weeds chemical, or go back to more complicated, labor-intensive ways of fighting weeds?"

"From its perch in a spacious brand-new headquarters blocks from the White House, the Cato Institute has built on its reputation as a venerable libertarian research center unafraid to cross party lines. Now, however, a rift with one of its founding members — the billionaire conservative Charles Koch — is threatening the institute's identity and independence, its leaders say, and is exposing fault lines over Mr. Koch's aggressive and well-financed brand of Republican politics."

"President Barack Obama said Friday that his personal experiences with America's national parks - both as an 11-year-old with his mother and grandmother and later as a father - have made a conservationist out of him. The President was speaking at a conference hosted by the White House linking conservation with strong local economies through tourism, outdoor recreation, and healthy lands, waters and wildlife."

Billionaire Aubrey McClendon CEO of Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second-largest natural gas producer, is an evangelist for "fracking." Is the boom in natural gas a bubble that will go bust as the price of gas itself continues a dizzying fall?

"When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday. According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms."

"Campbell's Soup has agreed to stop using the chemical BPA in the lining of its cans, joining a host of other brands moving away from using the substance."