Secession movements motivated by "escape from the tyranny of the urban/suburban majority" in Colorado, California/Oregon, and Maryland that I know about in the last few years. I got to ask questions at a seminar where one of the panel members was the treasurer from the Colorado organization. He was well-versed in the legal constraints involved in creating a new state. He was also aware of what kind of budget the new state could support, but regarded no Medicaid, no higher-ed, K-12 education reduced to a bare minimum set of classes, and fewer paved highways as features, not bugs.
Thank you, Burt, I didn't realize how much I missed these summaries until I'd read this one.
The political power of rural America went into terminal decline ~1880, when the federal government ran out of high-quality farmland that it could give away. They've been granted a bit of a respite lately by "self district packing" by the urban areas in a bunch of middle-sized states. I think that's only a temporary thing, as the urban areas continue to outgrow the rural ones everywhere. Consider the case of Nebraska as an extreme example: when the Unicameral there is redistricted after the 2020 census, 25 of the 49 members will be elected from just three of the state's 99 counties. Some of my acquaintances in rural Nebraska are already expressing concern.
The Supreme Court is the most extreme example of this. The Court is overwhelmingly made up of people who went to college at one of the Ivies and whose adult life has been spent in the northeast urban corridor. I worry that this may be a Bad Thing (this is probably the only subject that Justice Thomas and I have ever agreed on). I subscribe to the unorthodox view that one of the things that motivates CJ Roberts is that his court not be caught on the wrong side of history. Combine that with the Court members' urban bias, and you get a prediction that Texas wins, with a possibility that total population becomes the only acceptable metric.
From a completely different direction, the motivation for this case -- which is not the same thing as which national groups may jump on the bandwagon -- could be entirely local. During the last drought, the Texas legislature set up a water projects bank using a portion of the state's emergency fund (which had gotten embarrassing large due to high oil prices). It was commonly understood that the real purpose of the bank was to fund projects that would collect and store water in rural East Texas for transport to the rapidly growing urban areas. Urban Democrats and suburban Republicans passed it, over almost unanimous opposition from rural Republicans. Ms. Evenwel's (and the Titus County Republican Party's) entire motivation may be based on that.
The fast flux reactor DOE built at the Hanover Site, I suppose. The NRC and DOE are currently going back and forth about the licensing procedure to be used for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype that DOE is supposed to build at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL is the federal government's official reactor research and test facility, and has its own set of clean-up issues to deal with.
Which says, with the benefit of hindsight, that the NRC shouldn't have licensed it for commercial use, and it should have been built at one of the national labs on the taxpayers' dime as a research project.
I'm not sure if I should be mildly offended or not. So far as I know, I'm the only one here trying to actually "organize" a conspiracy. Perhaps that moves me past "theorist" to practitioner, though :^)
Next week, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a male-only Selective Service registration system. My (quite possibly wrong) understanding of the most recent SCOTUS decisions on the subject upheld the male-only system because there were no combat positions for women. This case was filed a couple years back when some combat positions were opened to women. The District Court held in this case that male-only was still okay because there were some combat positions woman weren't allowed to take. That ended this week.
The current system is for registration only. An actual draft would require Congress to pass additional statute. I'll guess that the Ninth's decision won't mention gender; they'll rule that mandatory registration in a system that hasn't actually drafted anyone for more than 40 years is improper. Especially since 99%+ of the relevant personnel could be identified from Social Security and IRS information within days of a decision to implement an actual draft.
How much of this is because the matter gets settled at the provincial level in Canada? I live in a state with significant oil/gas/coal production -- not one of the biggest players, but it's a significant policy topic -- and my perception is that without the possibility of the feds overruling, the oil/gas/coal companies and the environmentalists would be able to reach this kind of compromise.
Granted, a new state tax would be a messier proposition in Colorado than most places, since such a tax would have to go on the ballot as a referred (or initiated) matter and be voted on.
This was not the first game I've seen this year where a team lost on a hail-mary pass on the last play. The ones where the pass was successful all looked the same: the defense rushes three, the QB dances around for 7-8 seconds and gets outside the hash marks, then stops, gathers himself, and throws it 60 yards down the field. A leaping 6'6" receiver pulls it in over the head of a much shorter defender.
Rush five, drop six, make the QB throw it in four seconds while he's running as fast as he can. If I were the head coach, I'd be looking for a new defensive coordinator today.
But as you say, it still goes in the Packers' win column.
This is one of the broad differences between being east or west of the Great Plains. To the west, reliable agriculture means water storage, management and distribution. It's true even in western places people think of as wet. Portland is drier in July and August, on average, than Phoenix. Willamette Valley farm land with water rights is worth a lot more than similar land without the rights.
@burt-likko
Well, you're certainly not alone here in thinking that's what should happen. But is there any evidence that California in particular will go in that direction (and to a very large degree, as California goes, so goes the West).
I usually limit my policy bets to one beer, but I'm willing to bet you a six-pack of a good microbrew that PG&E will retire the Diablo Canyon reactors on or before their current operating licenses run out (2024 and 2025, IIRC). Estimates for cooling upgrades to meet the new discharge standards seem to run from $2B to $12B. Assume $7B -- that buys a lot of natural gas-fired generating capacity, which pairs nicely (from a reliability standpoint) with the availability in a few years of a large and increasing amount of wind power from Wyoming. The Transwest Express transmission line's final environmental impact statement was blessed earlier this year, which will tie the SoCal/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle to the east side of the Continental Divide.
When I spin western secession stories, I never talk about California going off on its own. California sits at the center (figuratively) of an enormous energy network that extends as far as El Paso, Wyoming and Alberta. That's not a criticism, it just means that the West is a whole thing. The same characteristic applies to the Northeast Urban Corridor -- its energy network extends as far as Quebec to the north and Illinois to the West. The urban corridor is a whole lot more dependent on nuclear than California, though, and doesn't have the opportunities to build the kind of regional renewable network California can.
So what we really need is a joint public/private partnership in developing a single standard design that everyone buys into...
When I put my old systems analyst hat on, I see a need for at least two designs in the US. The Western Interconnect is arid and would need a design that can be air cooled, which requires that the reactor operate at higher temperatures and pressures to get acceptable efficiencies. The Eastern Interconnect is water-rich and can get similar efficiencies at lower temperature and pressure (and cost) using water cooling. To use the classic single-design example, France has comparatively little difference in water availability across the entire country.
One of the reasons that wind and solar are popular in the states of the Western Interconnect is that water for conventional thermal power plants is largely unavailable. Blue Castle Holdings is an at least semi-serious company looking to build reactors in the West, with most of the power to be sold into the lucrative Southern California market. Eastern Utah was the closest location where they could find sufficient available water rights to build a conventional nuke.
The Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado came close in terms of technology. Pebble-like fuel pellets that included fertile thorium material and resulting high burn-up rates. High temperature gas coolant provided thermal efficiency that light-water reactors only dream about. Passively safe in the sense that a core meltdown simply couldn't occur. Ultimately a technical success, commercially a nightmare. Wouldn't be a bad starting point if the West were adopting nuclear -- use a closed Brayton rather than Rankine cycle and you might get away with air cooling rather than water cooling, dealing with one of the major hurdles for thermal power plants in the arid West.
Purely for the sake of extending the argument... There are places in upstate New York and Vermont that would provide an excellent deep-granite repository site. Better hydrological isolation than Yucca Mountain. Local population already shrinking. Farther from the nearest million-person metro area. Much closer to most commercial reactors, eliminating tens or hundreds of thousands of cask-miles of transport.
Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, WIPP... New York or Vermont can take one for the team this time, with no greater risks.
My understanding of the current science is that the top two choices are deep salt domes and deep non-faulted granite (Yucca Mountain is neither of these). Salt domes are plastic and after about 60 years it's hard to keep the storage volume from closing up. That's good, unless you want to operate the repository for longer than that, or decide after a couple of centuries that you want to retrieve the uranium and plutonium. Granite has the opposite advantages/disadvantages -- it will stay open, retrieval is straightforward, but sealing isn't automatic. Salt domes are most common along the Gulf Coast. The best granite sites are northern Minnesota/Wisconsin and the Adirondacks in New York.
Recall that DOE's original plan was for a large repository in the East close to all of the Eastern reactors, and a much smaller repository in the West for the small number of reactors there. Both salt domes and deep granite were on DOE's original list of sites to be evaluated. Everything but Yucca Mountain was eventually removed from the list by Congress for political reasons.
The regional argument -- and this is not new -- is that if dry cask storage is so safe that hundreds of thousands of tons of spent fuel can be hauled thousands of miles across the country and stacked in one place in Utah or Nevada, then it must be safe enough to just leave it stacked near the reactors, of which Utah and Nevada have exactly zero.
Here's the executive summary (PDF) of an interesting report from 2010 by the technical board charged by Congress with evaluating DOE's storage tech. The conclusion is, basically, we have little understanding of how well the dry casks will hold up in the medium term (60 to 120 years) and almost no idea how they will hold up in the long term (>120 years). Both categories as classed as open research questions.
Labor is by far the largest-volume "good" purchased in the US. If wages and salaries aren't going up, any sort of broad inflation is going to be short-lived.
Depending on which class, this might be difficult in Colorado. Some years back the state passed a law that the public four-year schools had to accept credits for certain classes from the community colleges. The flip side of that was the CCs had to teach those classes to the same standard the four-year schools used. Calculus, for example, adopted the same text and got more rigorous. Presumably, the for-profits would have to teach something labeled as calculus to that same standard if they wanted the credits accepted.
The four-year schools pay attention to what the CCs are doing now. School of Mines, probably the premier four-year engineering school, is just up the road from Red Rocks CC. A number of students accepted at Mines take generic first-year classes like calculus at Red Rocks because it's so much cheaper. People from the Mines' math dept drop in to observe classes at Red Rocks as an audit of sorts.
I hope the local overnight Fridaynistas were channeling their inner pioneer last night. Lows were in the teens (-10 °C for the imperially-challenged) and I just finished shoveling six inches of fresh snow off the driveway and walk.
Should it be necessary, my two-year-old granddaughter and I will be peacekeepers. She has a strong "try to be the kind of person the two-year-old thinks you are" effect on everyone. Even my obnoxious brother-in-law.
There are jurisdictions where open carry of firearms is legal, but carrying a sword is not. Because a sword is threatening. But apparently a loaded shotgun is not.
When I read that sentence, my reaction was that some sort of collective "we" interested in making this work -- the refugees, local/state/federal government, private charities -- ought to hire some of those well-educated Somalis with good English skills to be problem solvers.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
Secession movements motivated by "escape from the tyranny of the urban/suburban majority" in Colorado, California/Oregon, and Maryland that I know about in the last few years. I got to ask questions at a seminar where one of the panel members was the treasurer from the Colorado organization. He was well-versed in the legal constraints involved in creating a new state. He was also aware of what kind of budget the new state could support, but regarded no Medicaid, no higher-ed, K-12 education reduced to a bare minimum set of classes, and fewer paved highways as features, not bugs.
"
Thank you, Burt, I didn't realize how much I missed these summaries until I'd read this one.
The political power of rural America went into terminal decline ~1880, when the federal government ran out of high-quality farmland that it could give away. They've been granted a bit of a respite lately by "self district packing" by the urban areas in a bunch of middle-sized states. I think that's only a temporary thing, as the urban areas continue to outgrow the rural ones everywhere. Consider the case of Nebraska as an extreme example: when the Unicameral there is redistricted after the 2020 census, 25 of the 49 members will be elected from just three of the state's 99 counties. Some of my acquaintances in rural Nebraska are already expressing concern.
The Supreme Court is the most extreme example of this. The Court is overwhelmingly made up of people who went to college at one of the Ivies and whose adult life has been spent in the northeast urban corridor. I worry that this may be a Bad Thing (this is probably the only subject that Justice Thomas and I have ever agreed on). I subscribe to the unorthodox view that one of the things that motivates CJ Roberts is that his court not be caught on the wrong side of history. Combine that with the Court members' urban bias, and you get a prediction that Texas wins, with a possibility that total population becomes the only acceptable metric.
From a completely different direction, the motivation for this case -- which is not the same thing as which national groups may jump on the bandwagon -- could be entirely local. During the last drought, the Texas legislature set up a water projects bank using a portion of the state's emergency fund (which had gotten embarrassing large due to high oil prices). It was commonly understood that the real purpose of the bank was to fund projects that would collect and store water in rural East Texas for transport to the rapidly growing urban areas. Urban Democrats and suburban Republicans passed it, over almost unanimous opposition from rural Republicans. Ms. Evenwel's (and the Titus County Republican Party's) entire motivation may be based on that.
On “Why the Western US Is Anti-Nuclear”
The fast flux reactor DOE built at the Hanover Site, I suppose. The NRC and DOE are currently going back and forth about the licensing procedure to be used for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype that DOE is supposed to build at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL is the federal government's official reactor research and test facility, and has its own set of clean-up issues to deal with.
"
Which says, with the benefit of hindsight, that the NRC shouldn't have licensed it for commercial use, and it should have been built at one of the national labs on the taxpayers' dime as a research project.
On “Linky Friday #143: Rise & Shine”
I'm not sure if I should be mildly offended or not. So far as I know, I'm the only one here trying to actually "organize" a conspiracy. Perhaps that moves me past "theorist" to practitioner, though :^)
"
Next week, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a male-only Selective Service registration system. My (quite possibly wrong) understanding of the most recent SCOTUS decisions on the subject upheld the male-only system because there were no combat positions for women. This case was filed a couple years back when some combat positions were opened to women. The District Court held in this case that male-only was still okay because there were some combat positions woman weren't allowed to take. That ended this week.
The current system is for registration only. An actual draft would require Congress to pass additional statute. I'll guess that the Ninth's decision won't mention gender; they'll rule that mandatory registration in a system that hasn't actually drafted anyone for more than 40 years is improper. Especially since 99%+ of the relevant personnel could be identified from Social Security and IRS information within days of a decision to implement an actual draft.
"
How much of this is because the matter gets settled at the provincial level in Canada? I live in a state with significant oil/gas/coal production -- not one of the biggest players, but it's a significant policy topic -- and my perception is that without the possibility of the feds overruling, the oil/gas/coal companies and the environmentalists would be able to reach this kind of compromise.
Granted, a new state tax would be a messier proposition in Colorado than most places, since such a tax would have to go on the ballot as a referred (or initiated) matter and be voted on.
On “Fantasy Football: Week 12 (and Football Season open thread)”
This was not the first game I've seen this year where a team lost on a hail-mary pass on the last play. The ones where the pass was successful all looked the same: the defense rushes three, the QB dances around for 7-8 seconds and gets outside the hash marks, then stops, gathers himself, and throws it 60 yards down the field. A leaping 6'6" receiver pulls it in over the head of a much shorter defender.
Rush five, drop six, make the QB throw it in four seconds while he's running as fast as he can. If I were the head coach, I'd be looking for a new defensive coordinator today.
But as you say, it still goes in the Packers' win column.
On “Why the Western US Is Anti-Nuclear”
This is one of the broad differences between being east or west of the Great Plains. To the west, reliable agriculture means water storage, management and distribution. It's true even in western places people think of as wet. Portland is drier in July and August, on average, than Phoenix. Willamette Valley farm land with water rights is worth a lot more than similar land without the rights.
"
@burt-likko
Well, you're certainly not alone here in thinking that's what should happen. But is there any evidence that California in particular will go in that direction (and to a very large degree, as California goes, so goes the West).
I usually limit my policy bets to one beer, but I'm willing to bet you a six-pack of a good microbrew that PG&E will retire the Diablo Canyon reactors on or before their current operating licenses run out (2024 and 2025, IIRC). Estimates for cooling upgrades to meet the new discharge standards seem to run from $2B to $12B. Assume $7B -- that buys a lot of natural gas-fired generating capacity, which pairs nicely (from a reliability standpoint) with the availability in a few years of a large and increasing amount of wind power from Wyoming. The Transwest Express transmission line's final environmental impact statement was blessed earlier this year, which will tie the SoCal/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle to the east side of the Continental Divide.
When I spin western secession stories, I never talk about California going off on its own. California sits at the center (figuratively) of an enormous energy network that extends as far as El Paso, Wyoming and Alberta. That's not a criticism, it just means that the West is a whole thing. The same characteristic applies to the Northeast Urban Corridor -- its energy network extends as far as Quebec to the north and Illinois to the West. The urban corridor is a whole lot more dependent on nuclear than California, though, and doesn't have the opportunities to build the kind of regional renewable network California can.
"
I was trying to stay away from primary, secondary, and tertiary cooling loops, neutron moderation, and other techie porn :^)
"
You can go vertical as well. This picture shows a pair of 600 MW natural-draft dry cooling towers. These are 150 meters high.
"
Could you clarify that question, please?
"
So what we really need is a joint public/private partnership in developing a single standard design that everyone buys into...
When I put my old systems analyst hat on, I see a need for at least two designs in the US. The Western Interconnect is arid and would need a design that can be air cooled, which requires that the reactor operate at higher temperatures and pressures to get acceptable efficiencies. The Eastern Interconnect is water-rich and can get similar efficiencies at lower temperature and pressure (and cost) using water cooling. To use the classic single-design example, France has comparatively little difference in water availability across the entire country.
One of the reasons that wind and solar are popular in the states of the Western Interconnect is that water for conventional thermal power plants is largely unavailable. Blue Castle Holdings is an at least semi-serious company looking to build reactors in the West, with most of the power to be sold into the lucrative Southern California market. Eastern Utah was the closest location where they could find sufficient available water rights to build a conventional nuke.
"
The Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado came close in terms of technology. Pebble-like fuel pellets that included fertile thorium material and resulting high burn-up rates. High temperature gas coolant provided thermal efficiency that light-water reactors only dream about. Passively safe in the sense that a core meltdown simply couldn't occur. Ultimately a technical success, commercially a nightmare. Wouldn't be a bad starting point if the West were adopting nuclear -- use a closed Brayton rather than Rankine cycle and you might get away with air cooling rather than water cooling, dealing with one of the major hurdles for thermal power plants in the arid West.
"
Purely for the sake of extending the argument... There are places in upstate New York and Vermont that would provide an excellent deep-granite repository site. Better hydrological isolation than Yucca Mountain. Local population already shrinking. Farther from the nearest million-person metro area. Much closer to most commercial reactors, eliminating tens or hundreds of thousands of cask-miles of transport.
Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, WIPP... New York or Vermont can take one for the team this time, with no greater risks.
"
My understanding of the current science is that the top two choices are deep salt domes and deep non-faulted granite (Yucca Mountain is neither of these). Salt domes are plastic and after about 60 years it's hard to keep the storage volume from closing up. That's good, unless you want to operate the repository for longer than that, or decide after a couple of centuries that you want to retrieve the uranium and plutonium. Granite has the opposite advantages/disadvantages -- it will stay open, retrieval is straightforward, but sealing isn't automatic. Salt domes are most common along the Gulf Coast. The best granite sites are northern Minnesota/Wisconsin and the Adirondacks in New York.
Recall that DOE's original plan was for a large repository in the East close to all of the Eastern reactors, and a much smaller repository in the West for the small number of reactors there. Both salt domes and deep granite were on DOE's original list of sites to be evaluated. Everything but Yucca Mountain was eventually removed from the list by Congress for political reasons.
"
The regional argument -- and this is not new -- is that if dry cask storage is so safe that hundreds of thousands of tons of spent fuel can be hauled thousands of miles across the country and stacked in one place in Utah or Nevada, then it must be safe enough to just leave it stacked near the reactors, of which Utah and Nevada have exactly zero.
Here's the executive summary (PDF) of an interesting report from 2010 by the technical board charged by Congress with evaluating DOE's storage tech. The conclusion is, basically, we have little understanding of how well the dry casks will hold up in the medium term (60 to 120 years) and almost no idea how they will hold up in the long term (>120 years). Both categories as classed as open research questions.
On “The Fifth Annual Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Shopping Guide”
Labor is by far the largest-volume "good" purchased in the US. If wages and salaries aren't going up, any sort of broad inflation is going to be short-lived.
On “Linky Friday #142: Plumber Payday”
Depending on which class, this might be difficult in Colorado. Some years back the state passed a law that the public four-year schools had to accept credits for certain classes from the community colleges. The flip side of that was the CCs had to teach those classes to the same standard the four-year schools used. Calculus, for example, adopted the same text and got more rigorous. Presumably, the for-profits would have to teach something labeled as calculus to that same standard if they wanted the credits accepted.
The four-year schools pay attention to what the CCs are doing now. School of Mines, probably the premier four-year engineering school, is just up the road from Red Rocks CC. A number of students accepted at Mines take generic first-year classes like calculus at Red Rocks because it's so much cheaper. People from the Mines' math dept drop in to observe classes at Red Rocks as an audit of sorts.
"
W2: This is Cain bait, right?
On “Stop the War on Thanksgiving”
I hope the local overnight Fridaynistas were channeling their inner pioneer last night. Lows were in the teens (-10 °C for the imperially-challenged) and I just finished shoveling six inches of fresh snow off the driveway and walk.
On “If You Need a Thanksgiving Conversation Guide…”
Should it be necessary, my two-year-old granddaughter and I will be peacekeepers. She has a strong "try to be the kind of person the two-year-old thinks you are" effect on everyone. Even my obnoxious brother-in-law.
On “Neither Here Nor There”
There are jurisdictions where open carry of firearms is legal, but carrying a sword is not. Because a sword is threatening. But apparently a loaded shotgun is not.
On “Christie, Obama, and the Refugee Debate”
When I read that sentence, my reaction was that some sort of collective "we" interested in making this work -- the refugees, local/state/federal government, private charities -- ought to hire some of those well-educated Somalis with good English skills to be problem solvers.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.