California
California needs to embrace nuclear power
The conduct of California’s ruling class has been the reason for a lot astonishment. Just lately, in its infinite knowledge, a bunch of California regulators decreed that by 2035, the sale of all gasoline and diesel-fueled motor autos will probably be banned within the state. All new automotive purchases have to be electrical, irrespective of how unaffordable they’re or how unprepared California’s infrastructure is to accommodate them.
Just lately, amid an unprecedented warmth wave that’s straining California’s energy grid to the breaking level, the administration of stated grid requested electrical automotive homeowners to keep away from charging their autos throughout peak energy demand durations.
If these two competing mandates appear loopy to you, you aren’t alone. Happily, there’s a answer to California’s energy woes. The truth is, that answer presents itself with the uncommon wise determination that Sacramento not too long ago took to increase the lifetime of the Diablo Canyon nuclear energy plant till a minimum of 2030. Somebody apparently acknowledged that eliminating a tenth of California’s energy capability with no prepared method to exchange it’s a unhealthy concept.
For some years, California has launched into a headlong effort to modify the state’s energy grid to renewable sources, similar to photo voltaic and wind. The reasoning was that if the state eliminates vegetation that run on carbon-emitting coal and pure fuel, California will probably be doing its half to fight what some imagine is an existential risk to the planet.
But when the aim is to eradicate carbon dioxide, California’s decommissioning of carbon-free nuclear energy vegetation has been puzzling. Nuclear energy vegetation don’t emit greenhouse gases. Not like photo voltaic and wind, nuclear energy runs 24/7 with out the necessity for sophisticated power storage expertise.
Those that object to nuclear energy carry up the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima as causes to keep away from reliance on that expertise. Nonetheless, every of these accidents had particular causes that each different nuclear energy plant has prevented. Nuclear energy is definitely safer than fossil gas energy, contemplating the well being and environmental results of emissions.
The issue of storing nuclear waste, similar to spent gas rods, is each technically troublesome and politically controversial. Nonetheless, one answer to the issue is to recycle the waste into nuclear gas. America doesn’t recycle nuclear waste because of a 1977 determination by President Jimmy Carter, however Nice Britain, France, and Japan achieve this with appreciable success.
Within the meantime, an organization known as TerraPower is creating a brand new type of nuclear energy plant utilizing a expertise known as Natrium,
in line with CNBC
. Natrium nuclear energy vegetation use liquid sodium relatively than water as a cooling agent. The expertise is much less vulnerable to catastrophic meltdowns than typical nuclear energy. The facility vegetation produce much less nuclear waste. The primary Natrium nuclear energy plant is because of begin producing energy in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 2028.
The TerraPower expertise has challenges, a few of them regulatory, a few of them technical. The corporate should leap by way of many regulatory hoops to get approval for the Kemmerer plant. The U.S. just isn’t but in a position to enrich uranium sufficiently to energy a Natrium nuclear energy plant on an industrial scale. This energy plant will generate 345 megawatts of energy, roughly one-third of the Diablo Canyon plant’s capability, although it will possibly surge to 500 megawatts throughout peak demand durations.
Lastly, the Kemmerer nuclear energy plant will price $4 billion to construct. TerraPower hopes to get the fee right down to $1 billion for subsequent energy vegetation.
Nuclear energy vegetation, particularly these constructed with newer expertise, are the answer to California’s power disaster. The expertise may additionally be a political winner for California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom, it’s rumored, wish to run for president in 2024. At the moment, the case for his candidacy may be very weak, contemplating all of California’s self-inflicted woes. But when Newsom embraces nuclear energy and begins including it to California’s grid, the argument for electing him president turns into significantly much less absurd.
Mark Whittington, who incessantly writes about area and politics, is the creator of
Why is America Going Again to the Moon?
He blogs at Curmudgeons Nook.
California
California insurance department accused of hiding information on life insurance complaints
A Bay Area consumer-advocacy group claims California’s Department of Insurance is violating state public-records law by refusing to hand over important data on consumer complaints about life insurance.
The Pleasant Hill-based non-profit Life Insurance Consumer Advocacy Center called the department’s purported violation of the California Public Records Act “inexcusable.”
The department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Numbers and types of consumer complaints about life insurance and annuities, plus the reports and data the department used for the complaints section of its 2023 annual report, would help the non-profit promote the interests of life insurance customers, and provide key information to establish a baseline on consumer complaints.
“Why is (the department) trying to hide this information?” said the group’s executive director Brian Brosnahan.
Of particular interest to the group is assessing consumers’ responses after passage this year of California Senate Bill 263, which imposes requirements for agents selling life insurance, including that they not put their own interest ahead of a customer’s. The group alleges that the the bill, now law, lets agents “falsely tell” a consumer they do not have conflicts of interest with the consumer, even if they stand to make substantial commissions if the customer follows their guidance.
The Department of Insurance’s alleged stonewalling has gone on for months, the group said in a news release Tuesday. An initial request in August drew a response from the department that it did not have the information, according to the group, which responded by pointing out that the department’s annual report contained charts showing total complaints and the top 10 complaint topics. The department “obviously did possess the requested information,” the group claimed.
Another back-and-forth followed, with the department saying the requested data was “not maintained by the Department,” the group said.
“This statement is obviously false since (the department) necessarily maintains the underlying data and reports from which the charts in the Annual Report were generated,” the group claimed.
In October, the department “finally admitted that it possessed the requested data,” the group said, but now is refusing to provide it, saying it is confidential, the group said.
Originally Published:
California
Kamala’s California problem
In the final days of the presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump never missed a chance to tie his opponent to California. It was a critique that required no elaboration—though true to form, Trump didn’t shy away from providing an overheated one. At his Madison Square Garden rally in October, he proclaimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was a “radical-left lunatic” who “destroyed California.”
Breathless rhetoric notwithstanding, it is a problem for national Democratic ambitions that California—the state most associated with the party’s rule—is now synonymous with the top issue of the election: the rising cost of living.
For the first time in recent memory, housing costs emerged as a major presidential election issue. (Experts agree that it’s the last major driver of inflation.) And while Harris promised to oversee the construction of 3 million homes over her term, that wasn’t enough to shake the California stigma.
As of 2024, California has the most expensive housing of any continental U.S. state, with a median home price that is more than eight times the state median household income. (A healthy ratio is considered between three to five times the state median income. The ratio in Texas is four.) As a result, working- and middle-class Californians have virtually no path to homeownership.
Locked out of homeownership, half of California renters spend at least a third of their income—for many, up to 50 percent—on rent. And they’re the lucky ones: Nearly 200,000 Californians and counting are homeless.
On some level, rank-and-file Democrats understand that the state is a problem. Ask a progressive in swing states like North Carolina or Wisconsin what she thinks about California, and she will likely try to change the topic of conversation. (Could you imagine a conservative having the same reluctance about Texas?)
Where millions of Americans—myself included—once knew California as a place where friends and family went off and claimed their slice of the dream, the Golden State is today better known as the source of embittered migrants making cash offers on homes.
Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of people have voted with their feet and left the state. Sluggish population growth over the 2010s led California to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 reapportionment. (On net, red states picked up three seats in that election.) Amid declining immigration, the state has started losing population for the first time in history.
In 2022 alone, an estimated 102,000 Californians moved to Texas. They weren’t fleeing the perfect weather or the high-paying jobs—by and large, they were pushed out by the cost of living.
Occasionally, California’s progressive NIMBYs celebrate this unhappy exodus as a way of flipping other Mountain West states blue. Yet this year, Nevada voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 20 years. Even before the election, the polls acknowledged that Arizona was a lost cause for the Democrats.
It turns out that forcing people to abandon their home state in search of an affordable home doesn’t exactly engender party loyalty. Indeed, it may be having the opposite effect: Surveys out of states like Texas suggest that new arrivals from California might actually be more conservative than the locals.
Of course, Kamala Harris isn’t the reason California has a housing crisis. Democrats aren’t even solely to blame—the zoning that has made it illegal to build housing in California has been backed by NIMBYs of the right and left, and it was Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan who signed the state’s infamous environmental review act into law.
But the state has been under Democratic supermajority control since 2011. Outside of the unusual case of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican who backed Harris for president, they have effectively run the state since 1999. The undecided voter might be forgiven for wondering why this issue has only gotten worse under a quarter century of Democratic governance.
Immediately after the election, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom—who has made no secret of his presidential ambitions—called for a special session to address how California will respond to anticipated attacks on reproductive rights, immigrants, and the state’s climate policies by the Trump administration. The proclamation makes no mention whatsoever of the cost-of-living issues that likely handed the election to Trump.
There is a small but growing cadre of pro-housing Democratic state legislators who have taken up the cause of cutting through the red tape and getting California building again. And they’ve had some successes: Since 2017, the state has legalized granny flats, abolished parking mandates, and streamlined permitting. But all too often, reform efforts have been stymied by members of their own party.
It’s too late for Kamala Harris. But the next Democratic nominee for president had better hope those reformers are successful.
California
California Lottery Powerball, Daily 3 Midday winning numbers for Nov. 11, 2024
The California Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Nov. 11, 2024, results for each game:
Powerball
03-21-24-34-46, Powerball: 09, Power Play: 3
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily 3
Midday: 9-4-2
Evening: 5-6-3
Check Daily 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily Derby
1st:4 Big Ben-2nd:12 Lucky Charms-3rd:6 Whirl Win, Race Time: 1:44.41
Check Daily Derby payouts and previous drawings here.
Fantasy 5
07-10-29-30-34
Check Fantasy 5 payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily 4
3-7-9-7
Check Daily 4 payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Desert Sun producer. You can send feedback using this form.
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