In that context, the $50bn scheme announced by President Obama to improve roads, railways and airports is a drop in the ocean. Second, among the presidents separating Obama from FDR is a certain Ronald Reagan, whose hostility to big government shifted the whole spectrum of US politics to the right. And the results seem to have had a cooling effect on the whole property. Racial covenants or racially restrictive deeds barred people of color from owning or occupying a property. The line was designed when we thought the most important thing about a light rail line was convincing people to ride it in from Eden Prarie. Last month Amtrak, the national passenger rail network, unveiled a plan that would put Washington within 96 minutes of New York and barely three hours of Boston. The other rail tunnel is (or rather was) in New Jersey, and would have linked the Garden State to Manhattan, vastly improving clogged access to New York City, with long-term economic benefits to match. Another reminder is when friends return from foreign trips marvelling at the high-speed rail networks in Europe, Japan and China, or at other man-made wonders such as the Millau Viaduct in southern France.

Tea Partiers are not into building bridges and modernising airports out of the public purse, or endowing the US with a state-of-the-art passenger rail system. Since Reagan, public suspicion of government intervention has taken a quantum leap. Just like FDR, he had come to power in miserable economic times, a Democratic president promising to unleash the power of the government on vast public works to revive the economy and generate jobs. No one in government or industry can reasonably explain how we would pay for such a catastrophe. As the US attempts to dig out from economic collapse, a little-known nuclear industry liability could seriously derail Obama's attempt to revive our finances. When the nuke power industry first got going, utility executives refused to invest, citing the insupportable costs of a potential disaster. Because the industry cannot get its own insurance, we taxpayers are on the hook. When state and federal budgets are under so much pressure such projects, it is argued, cannot be afforded.

Long-term borrowing rates are rock-bottom; a 9.6 per cent unemployment rate underlines how much spare capacity exists in the economy. Most American reactors are in what were once considered remote regions. Chernobyl exploded in a remote rural region in an impoverished country. But Indian Point is about half as far from Manhattan as is Chernobyl from Kiev. Thus far at least, it hasn't happened - for several reasons. By conservative accounts Chernobyl's explosion has so far cost a half-trillion dollars, with its financial toll continuing to accrue. The cost was simply too high, he declared; in these cash-strapped times, New Jersey had better things to spend its money on. It will have cost $10bn (PS6.2bn), representing $1,300 of taxpayer's money for every citizen in the land of William Tell. The project, 20 years in the planning, would have cost around $9bn, or roughly $1,000 for each inhabitant of one of the richest states in the US. The only problem was, it would take 30 years and cost $117bn. I didn't really become a designer until I was 30 years old: does this mean I was thinking differently before then?

Chernobyl's lethal cloud began pouring into the atmosphere 23 years ago this week. The new bridge took five years to complete and is said to have the longest single-span concrete arch in the Western hemisphere. As other great achievements of its kind (the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, for example) it actually adds to the magnificence of its setting. Every now and then, the defects explode into the national consciousness - when breaches in scandalously neglected levees led to the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, or when the Interstate 35 bridge in minneapolis exterior remodeling collapsed one sunny rush hour afternoon in August 2007, sending 13 people to their deaths as their cars plunged into the Mississippi river. J. Richard Willis, Ph.D., vice president for engineering, research and technology at the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA), who has a doctorate in asphalt design and construction. In 1892 he closed his construction business and became a consulting engineer, building many structures with concrete frames composed of columns, beams, and slabs.