kairos power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy; graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. If all goes according to plan, the system—never tried before—will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction.
Demand for Colorado River water picked up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile-long water delivery system, brings water from the Colorado River to Arizona’s most populous counties and wasn’t completed until the 1990s. The Southern Nevada Water Authority was created in 1991.
Arizona began starting to take its full apportionment of river water in the late 1990s, and Nevada in the early 2000s. California continues using the single largest share of the river.
“Now the water use is maxed out. Every state is taking too much, and we have to cut back. And so there’s just not enough. You would need wet year after wet year, after wet year after wet year, after wet year. Even then, because the demand is so high, it still wouldn’t fill,” Hasencamp said in an interview.
A power outage and a social media post led to a 250-person fight over “free food” in a grocery store dumpster, Texas authorities said.
An H-E-B grocery store on the southeast side of Austin experienced a “sustained power outage” and had to throw out a large amount of perishable food on Thursday, Feb. 2, the company told CBS Austin in a statement.
Someone noticed the food in the grocery store dumpster and posted about the “free food” on social media, Travis County Constable George Morales III said in a Facebook post.
Over 250 people arrived at the grocery store and began fighting in the dumpster over the discarded food, Morales said. Videos of the scene showed people in the dumpster grabbing food and tossing it into waiting carts.
But why? We've had cold winters before, and the price of gas has increased only modestly. The answer is related to a seeming mystery: December prices were also well above average in 2021 even though winter was fairly warm that year. That doesn't make sense.
The problem was a pipeline from Texas that exploded in Coolidge, Arizona, earlier in the year and killed a person. The pipeline is operated by Kinder Morgan, and another one of their pipelines had exploded in Tucson in 2003. For this reason, the town of Coolidge was none too eager for the pipeline to reopen, and the NTSB was cautious too because they couldn't figure what caused the explosion. This cut off one of California's sources of natural gas, which made it difficult to get enough supply during winter months.
