CALIFORNIA / Nuclear power plant bill dies -- committee chair cuts off author

Hooray! This is why we vote for Democrats!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/17/BAGHEP9QQA1.DTL

CALIFORNIA
Nuclear power plant bill dies -- committee chair cuts off author

Matthew Yi, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

(04-17) 04:00 PDT Sacramento -- A bill that sought to lift California's three-decade ban on building new nuclear power plants died Monday in a Democrat-controlled legislative committee.

It was clear that the legislation would get a chilly reception in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee when the chairwoman abruptly interrupted a presentation by the bill's author, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine (Orange County), and asked him to finish his opening remarks.

"You've spoken for five minutes ... and I'm wondering if you can wrap up," said Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley. The committee voted 3 to 6 along party lines.

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John Hutson, the group's chief executive, said the death of AB719 won't deter his group from going forward with its plans. In fact, the Fresno group's board is scheduled to meet today to consider putting an initiative on the ballot asking voters to repeal the state's nuclear ban.

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This article appeared on page D - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

I vote for state legislators to pass laws on my behalf. This running to the voters every time you don't get your way is real BS. I can only say that I'm happy it didn't work at the last special election.

We'll look a lot like Mexico. In the Eastern and the Southern Untited States, a lot of population centers are going to look like New Orleans does now.

What scares me is the nuclear plants at Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, and Palo Verde will probably be kept running well past sixty years held together with duct tape, bailing wire, and old SUV parts.

process of collapsing. Considering that their oil industry is nationalized and written into it's constitution, and take care of 40% of it's governmental budget, it will be just fine. :eyes:

However, I maybe misreading your concept, are you talking about Mexico today or Mexico 3 years from now, when they are rioting because the price of corn (because of the ethanol fuel myth) is through the roof and they have no more oil?

But I can picture California coping reasonably well with a precipitous drop in natural gas supplies and rising sea levels. Places like Florida won't fare so well simply because mountains don't rise right up out of the sea there.

Migratory pressures are going to be severe, very reminiscent of the Great Depression.

I often think that red state "middle America" doesn't realize that the industrial and agricultural economy of California isn't them. Most of the kids in my world (including to some extent my own) have Mexican-American sorts of attitudes towards politics. Their families don't suffer any social studies textbook illusions about the way U.S. society works -- the corruption afflicting this society affects them very directly and can't be covered up with patriotic words, clothing, bumper stickers and perfumes. The Mexican and US flags both represent something very similar in nature, good and bad, societies in which the upper classes really do have opportunities and privileges that the common people don't have. Red State Middle America doesn't see that, which is why they continue to vote against their own interests, always chasing the dangling carrots and hoping to pull themselves up someday by their own bootstraps.

Okay, we can build seawalls around some areas, like the low-lying areas of the city of San Francisco, but that'll be the *only* easy fix in the state. I'd like to see a figure for what percent of the state's population lives less than 20 feet above sea level, but even if it's only a few percent, that's still a lot of people.

Also, if the sea rises enough that the Delta becomes brackish, we're totally screwn.

Our shiny, happy, people's democratic economy is based on good weather, cheap water, and infrequent natural disasters that only affect a few thousand people at most. All that could change.

I'm not sure how you'll do out there. It all depends on how well the hydroelectricity holds up and how long you can maintain access to natural gas.

California is going to have to answer some hard questions about energy and water ultimately. Energy and water are inextricably mixed there, of course.

DeVore is a Republican of course, but many Democrats are thinking seriously about nuclear energy, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives.



http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2007/02/08/pelosi-reconsiders-nuclear-power/

The usual morons, Public Citizen et al, went into a typical meltdowns, of course, but the fact is that reality is intruding.

Five years ago nobody would have even dreamed of raising the point of new nuclear build in California. Most rational people are recognizing that the fossil fuel shell game is not sustainable.

Pro-nuke Republican morons were on TV blaming it on environmentalists,
saying we needed to build lots of nukes and coal plants,
telling us the problem was too many environmental regulations.

I don't think CA's million-solar roof program is going to bail you out of that.

Knowing the crash is inevitable, they seek to maximize their profits.

They want to ride the top of the wave, not be ground into the rocks beneath it, and they don't care if they hurt people doing it.

This is a nasty surfing beach populated by bullies and gangsters and patrolled by sharks.

The deaths should be laid on the hands of fossil fuel shilling airheads who identify themselves as "environmentalists" even as they deny the cleanest and safest form of energy on the planet: That would be nuclear energy.

California has been playing the natural gas shell game for quite some time, all through the 1990's, but guess what? The gas is going to be gone. They won't be able to build the dangerous LNG terminals in Malibu or anywhere else, and even if they could, there's no clear evidence that they'll be anyone willing to unload anything at them.

The other California solution has been pure NIMBY: Doing things like buying coal power from Nevada and claiming "it's not ours."

Guess what? There's no carbon dioxide wall at Lake Tahoe. Coal kills everyone on the planet, everywhere.

Meanwhile before those dams are silt and the rivers around them will die and still still the mindless will be pretending that it's not your fault.

I recognize that people like Nancy Pelosi are suddenly waking up to what climate change and dangerous fossil fuel waste is about, but I fully expect a certain subset of the population to remain unredeemly clueless.

I note that you claim, once more to speak for all Democrats, by the way.

Besides Pelosi, other Democrats speaking in positive terms about nuclear energy, include at least 2 of the 4 major Presidential candidates, because in spite of all the "renewables will save us" rhetoric, the world has recognized that renewable energy will never be built fast enough to do doodly squat.

The triumph of stupidity will, in due time, lead to desperation. I have no idea if you live in California but hell if I'm not glad I moved. They have a big problem with reality in that state, which explains how they elected Hydrogen Hummer Boy on a big promise of a brazillion solar roofs.

Speaking of the solar roofs, here's a satellite photo selected at random from Palo Alto:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=palo+alto&z=18&ll=37.442564,-122.139945&spn=0.00181,0.003616&t=k&om=1&iwloc=addr

I don't see even one of those Brazillion roofs, nor do I see any hydrogen Hummer stations.