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The nuclear industry may be experiencing its own Alamo in San Antonio.

The city’s involvement in what could be the first new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in almost three decades is in question after months of scandal concerning cost overruns and allegations of secrecy at City Public Services, the city-owned utility. Anti-nuclear activists are urging San Antonio to walk away from the plan to build two 1,350-megawatt reactors at the South Texas Project, a nuclear power plant near Bay City co-owned by NRG Energy Inc., City Public Services, and Austin Energy.

“Everyone is watching,” said former Bush EPA head Christine Todd Whitman when she passed through the Alamo City in July, according to the San Antonio Business Journal. “What happens here will set the pace for nuclear energy elsewhere. It will be very important.”

In 2006, NRG, the company heading up the project, put the cost at $5.2 billion and offered equity stakes to San Antonio and Austin. The San Antonio utility, with backing from the political and business establishment, took a 40 percent share. Nuclear power, they reasoned, would be the cheapest and easiest way to fuel the growing city. Austin bowed out. Green-energy boosters pointed to delays and cost increases involved in the original South Texas Project in the 1970s and ’80s.

Those concerns turned out to be prophetic: The price tag for the proposed plant has more than tripled, to $17 billion.

The real meltdown in San Antonio came in November, two days before a key City Council vote to commit $400 million to the project, then predicted to cost $13 billion. Word leaked that CPS management knew the Toshiba Corp. subsidiary constructing the reactors wanted $4 billion more for the plant, a fact that hadn’t been mentioned to the City Council. CPS executives rushed off to Japan to negotiate the price. Mayor Julián Castro called on the two longest-running CPS board members to resign and suggested the deal would be scrapped if costs didn’t come down. (Five city council members are pushing for a no-confidence vote on the two board members.)

Opponents view San Antonio’s experience as a broader indictment of the so-called “nuclear renaissance.”

“The nuclear industry was born in secrecy and grew up in deceit, and nothing much has changed,” said Eric Lane, San Antonio businessman and chairman of the Consumer’s Energy Coaltion. “We just had another example of that here.”

In Lane’s view, one shared by some utility experts, NRG needs San Antonio more than the city needs NRG.

“They have us to fall back on when the cost overruns occur. That’s what makes San Antonio so attractive. NRG can declare bankruptcy and go home tomorrow. CPS can’t; it’s a public entity. We could be responsible for 100 percent” of the costs.

First Gulf Coast residents survived two hurricanes. Now they must endure the convoluted bureaucracy that’s dispensing the recovery money.

Take Chambers and Galveston counties. They neighbor each other on the Gulf Coast and were both slammed last year by Hurricane Ike. That’s where the similarities end. Chambers County is rural, marshy, and sparsely populated. Galveston is denser, more urban, and houses a population 10 times greater than its neighbor to the northeast. The hurricane’s damage to people and property in Galveston was much greater than in Chambers. Almost half of the 26,000 homes severely damaged by Ike and Hurricane Dolly are in Galveston County.

Yet Galveston County may not receive its fair share of hurricane recovery money. That’s because of the upside-down funding formula devised by the Texas Department of Rural Affairs, the agency Gov. Rick Perry assigned to oversee the recovery.

In doling out $3 billion of congressionally approved disaster aid, the agency is relying on a model, designed by a private contractor, that’s based not on actual damage to homes, businesses, and public infrastructure, but instead on weather data from the storm—wind, rain and storm surge—to calculate how much money each county receives. “You’re essentially weighing damage to an empty field in the same way as damage to a block and a neighborhood,” says Madison Sloan, an attorney with Texas Appleseed, an advocacy group for low-income Texans. No other state does it this way.

In the initial calculations, Chambers County was slated to receive $113 million more than Galveston. That was so ludicrous that state officials were forced to recalibrate. The numbers are still in flux, but critics fear that the Houston-Galveston region may get shorted by $300 million.

Because of the weather model, critics contend, rural areas and inland East Texas communities that suffered relatively little damage could receive a disproportionate share of recovery funds at the expense of hard-hit urban and suburban areas. With fewer homes and businesses to rebuild, what would rural counties spend recovery money on? The lion’s share will probably go to infrastructure and economic development projects, some of which may have only a tenuous link to natural disasters, housing advocates say. Joe Higgs of Gulf Coast Interfaith calls it a “spread the wealth” approach.

“Nothing wrong with that if it’s a stimulus program or it’s a general ‘renewal Texas’ program, but the money wasn’t given” for that purpose, Higgs says. “It was given to help people recover from the devastating events of hurricanes Dolly and Ike.”

The complaints are finally being heard. In November, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development rejected Texas’ spending plan for the second round of disaster funds—about $1.7 billion (the first round, $1.3 billion, was mostly distributed earlier this year). HUD told the state to provide more detail on how funds would be allocated to local governments and give the public a chance to weigh in.

As flawed as Texas’ hurricane recovery may be, it does have a political upside for Perry, critics say. The Texas Department of Rural Affairs has devised a system that’s generous to rural East Texas, an important part of Perry’s political base. It’s putting spending money into the hands of local politicians, something that may come in handy in an election year. By passing spending decisions to a state agency and local officials, the program “insulates the governor from making any politically sensitive decision,” says John Henneberger, co-director of the Low Income Housing Information Service. “He can simply point to the locals and say we gave them the money, blame them. … This is all about dodging responsibility.”

They don’t call him ‘Smokey Joe’ for nothing:

It takes serious revisionist thinking to believe that history has “vindicated” Joseph McCarthy, but that’s what some members of the State Board of Education contend. If they get their way, that’s how Texas schools will portray the late red-baiting U.S. Senator in social studies classes.

The 15-member board is rewriting the social studies curriculum. It’s a year-long process, and nothing will be final until next spring. So far, the seven Christian conservatives on the board have made clear they want to slip right-wing ideology into the standards, including re-imagining McCarthy.

The process began last spring, not long after the board finished its notorious fight over whether to teach kids the “weaknesses” of evolution. The board brought in experts to review the social studies curriculum and write draft versions of new standards, which will guide textbooks and lesson plans for Texas public schools. Board members can nominate any expert they like, and the ones appointed by the Christian conservative faction recommended removing references to African-American and Latino figures like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from some social-studies standards. One expert observed during a board meeting last spring that the curriculum contained an “overrepresentation of minorities.” According to the Christian conservative experts, Christianity was underrepresented. They recommended that the curriculum emphasize that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

In the end, the right-wing experts were outvoted by social studies teachers and mainstream academics on the curriculum-review teams. The teams finished the latest draft in October, and groups like the Texas Freedom Network were pleased with the results. Chavez and Marshall remained.

But the fight is just beginning. At its meeting in mid-November, the board voted to forbid their appointed experts from having any more input. That leaves the fate of social studies curriculum in the hands of the board. Its members have two chances to vote on curriculum changes, first at a board meeting Jan. 13 to Jan. 15, and again in mid-March.

Don McLeroy, the conservative board member from Bryan who last spring was deposed as chair, has provided a hint of what lies ahead. In late October, McLeroy sent his colleagues a note in which he wrote, “Read the latest on McCarthy—he was basically vindicated.” Other conservative members have agreed that recent research exonerates McCarthy, whose alarmist rhetoric in the 1950s led to a witch hunt for supposed Communists and Soviet spies.

The revisionists are referring to documents from Russian archives and American intelligence files showing there were, in fact, Soviet spies in America during the Cold War. Some conservatives have used these revelations to claim that McCarthy was right all along. Several prominent historians have tried to dispel that thinking, including Harvey Klehr, the Emory University historian who helped unearth older Soviet documents. He has said the presence of Soviet spies doesn’t validate the wild claims made by McCarthy, whom he has called a demagogue.

But testimonials from historians might not dissuade conservatives on the board. “The arguments don’t matter,” said Dan Quinn with the Texas Freedom Network. “The unfortunate thing is that the state board has become a body in which politics trumps education. If they have the votes, they do what they want, and it makes no difference what any expert or educator has to say about it.”

It seems especially ironic for a city that’s spawned as much literary imagery as Laredo—it inspired Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, amont others—to lose its only bookstore.

The B. Dalton bookstore at the Mall del Norte is slated for extinction at the end of January. (The city’s independent bookstore, Bookmark Books, closed in 2000.)

“There’s just something comforting about having a bookstore,” says Xochitl Mora, public information officer for the city of Laredo. “A city needs a bookstore.”

It’s not as if Laredo, with a population of roughly 230,000, is a stagnating backwater. The border city is fast-growing, youthful and vibrant. Its Mexican sister city, Nuevo Laredo, is growing even faster, with 350,000 residents. People from Nuevo Laredo cross the international bridge to buy Spanish-language books at B. Dalton, Mora says.

The bookstore’s looming closure has even imperiled the citywide book club. Mora helps spearhead the initiative—called One City, One Book—to get Laredoans reading. Mora orders the books, sometimes 500 or more, for members to buy at B. Dalton.

Not long ago, Mora brought Pulitzer-winning journalist Sonia Nazario to present her book, Enrique’s Journey, to the club. “It had a lot of meaning for the author to be here because part of the book took place in Nuevo Laredo, our sister city,” Mora says.

Laredo’s B. Dalton store, though profitable, is a victim of larger economic trends like online shopping. The money-losing B. Dalton chain, a division of Barnes & Noble Inc., is closing nationwide. Since 2000, Barnes & Noble has been closing B. Dalton franchises as their leases expired.

What are literary Laredoans to do? Mora says that she and other communications professionals have formed a group called “Laredo Reads.” They are putting together a publicity campaign to attract a bookstore. “We’ll find a way,” she says.