The longer Donald Trump remains president and Harry Reid remains retired, the greater the chances that canisters bearing more than 3.5 million pounds of nuclear waste from the shut-down San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) will end up beneath a mountain about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

And the closer this proposed solution to a serious problem comes to reality, the greater the chances it will pit well-meaning Californians against each other, both sides with legitimate environmental concerns that so far appear of little or no interest to Trump’s administration.

The waste involved, say San Diego-area consumer groups, is extremely deadly and could remain potentially lethal for about 250,000 years — much longer than the known history of the human race. Planned burial of the canisters near the beachfront abutting the SONGS site along Interstate 5 at the San Diego-Orange county line may be delayed as Edison and consumer lawyers try to negotiate another disposition for them. Those negotiations have already postponed a civil trial scheduled to begin April 14.

Should the canisters stay beneath the beach and leak, they could endanger more than 8.4 million persons living within 50 miles, not to mention freeway drivers and passengers on an adjacent coastal rail route.

Enter Yucca Mountain. The hollowed-out mountain was considered in the 1990s as a prime candidate for storage of nuclear waste from around the nation, now scattered widely in supposedly temporary sites.

Then Reid, the recently retired Democratic Nevada senator and longtime Senate Democratic leader, stepped in along with now-retired California Democrat Barbara Boxer. Both expounded a theory that radioactivity from Yucca Mountain could trickle into underground water supplies that eventually flow to the Colorado River upstream from the aqueduct belonging to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides significant supplies to about half of all Californians. They warned that stored waste at Yucca Mountain could pollute much of California’s and Arizona’s water supply for generations to come.

Any threat to those water supplies can only create pressure to draw  more water from rivers in Northern California.

Yucca Mountain also became highly unpopular in Nevada, whose citizenry resisted becoming a dumping ground for the most toxic waste in America when there isn’t even a nuclear power plant in that state.

Now comes the Trump administration, which has seemed to care little about polluting anything, from air to water to the airwaves, where it admits purveying “alternative facts.” That’s another phrase for lies, distortions and exaggerations. Meanwhile, no one has either proved or disproved the potential threat from a Yucca Mountain dump.

So far, Trump proposes spending $120 million to restart the licensing process for the site. But Yucca Mountain could end up costing more than 1,000 times that much — a possible $100 billion for things like 300-plus miles of new railroad track to bring waste there, advanced robots to work underground with waste canisters, and building of massive underground titanium shields designed to keep waste from most of the 48 contiguous states contained for hundreds of thousands of years beyond the lifetime of anyone alive today.

Trump’s aim is to keep nuclear power plants operational as long as possible. They currently supply about 20 percent of America’s power, with more than two dozen now storing radioactive waste on or near their own sites on a longstanding “temporary” basis.

The renewed controversy would not be happening if Reid were still leading the Senate. The strong push by San Diego County residents to move SONGS waste far away from them will only add pressure to the drive for Yucca Mountain.

There is no doubt America needs a waste storage site, as all existing ones are at capacity. Yucca Mountain got its newest boost the other day, when Energy Secretary Rick Perry — a determined rival of California during his eight years as Texas governor — quietly visited the area.

But Nevada officials are united against it, including Democrats like Reid successor Catherine Cortez Masto and Republicans led by Gov. Brian Sandoval. So far, no California official has been involved in the new push for the site.

More and more, this looks like a political landmine, with legitimate environmental worries on both sides of a decades-old dispute.

Thomas D. Elias is a writer in Southern California.

It seems there’s no escape from a showdown between far-left and far-right activists.

They’ve made California, and UC Berkeley in particular, into a sort of ground zero for a battle of words — and sometimes more than just words.

While free speech and political correctness are the hot buttons, something even broader is at stake. Americans are anxious and uncertain about whether we still have what it takes to practice politics together in a face-to-face way, not just as members of contending teams or tribes, but as fellow citizens. But, in spite of the many grievances surrounding prior street clashes and the complicated cancellation of an address by Ann Coulter, the latest encounter between polar opposites at Berkeley has given Californians and Americans a good look at our better angels.

Several days of protests culminated not in hand-to-hand combat but in the sort of dialogue and conversation that national leaders have so often called for, but rarely been able to lead in an unscripted and spontaneous way. Such episodes can seem fleeting and marginal to hardened cultural warriors, and, indeed, often they are. Nevertheless, amid the current climate of mutual hostility — and confronted with the well-intentioned but reactive brittleness of Berkeley administrators ultimately unwilling to risk what activists on both sides were able to — last week’s peacefully interactive protests gently threw down an unexpected gauntlet to campuses across the country.

As campuses have become fraught, paralyzed places, the gatherings at Berkeley have raised the question of whether a better social education will have to be found elsewhere, or at least outside the auspices of our institutions of higher learning.

To be sure, while some agitators and provocateurs have a vested professional interest in seeing crowds pushed to the breaking point, if not beyond, too many colleges and universities have spent years tying themselves into the kind of emotional and political knots that beg for a cathartic moment, however angry, to cut people loose. A half-revolutionary, half-bureaucratic movement to sanitize and control all interaction has gone too far, and more in a social way than a political one.

“Correctness” today too often means far more than observing the right political pieties. It pushes deep into the intimate details of students’ and others’ lives, hearts and minds, taking on an authoritarian cast that isn’t diminished by administrators’ sense that justice or sensitivity might demand it.

Meanwhile, everyday Americans, often possessed of relatively extreme or unusual opinions, have found a way — absent organized violence from “antifa” anarchists — to sidestep the toxic cloud of campus anxiety and take one another as they find them: as human beings who share deep concerns that America has wound up at a crossroads where politics as usual can’t continue without breaking down. Theirs is a spirit and a practice that ought to be second nature to administrators and students on any campus — certainly at Berkeley, where the contemporary free speech movement began in earnest during wildly more troubled and dangerous times.

If colleges and universities can no longer provide students — and the rest of us — with a basic model of free citizenship, we’ve learned in the past week not to lose hope that we can still count on one another to deliver.

This is an actual transcript of a conversation I had with my teenage son the day before he took his written driver’s license exam. Even though he’d been anxiously anticipating this moment for years, he was feeling cocky about his prospects. Luckily, teenagers know everything.

Marla Jo Fisher, speaking to her 18-year-old son, Cheetah Boy, who is lying on the couch playing Grand Theft Auto:

11 a.m. MJF: You’d better start studying for your drivers’ license written test tomorrow.

11:01 a.m. CB: I already know everything to pass the test.

11:02 a.m. MJF: Regardless, you should study. There are a lot of tricky little questions on that test.

11:03 a.m. CB: I’m good.

Later that day …

2 p.m. MJF: I emailed you a link to practice DMV tests. You should turn off that video game and get on your laptop and practice the exam. Your test is early tomorrow.

2:01 p.m. CB: OK, thanks.

2:02 p.m. MJF: No, seriously. You really should.

2:03 p.m. CB: OK, OK. Get off me.

The next morning. 9:30 a.m. Outside the Stanton DMV office. Marla Jo Fisher waits in the car reading a magazine, as her son goes inside to take the test. He’s gone a long time, then finally returns, visibly agitated.

CB: I took the test twice and only missed passing by two questions, the first time, and one question the second time. The questions were stupid. One was about animals by the side of the road. Who cares about animals by the side of the road?

MJF: Well, you should have studied like I told you. I hope it was a learning experience for you.

CB: I only missed it by one question, and it was a stupid one! It had nothing to do with studying.

MJF: You keep thinking of this as if it were winning the lottery. It has nothing to do with chance. It has to do with preparation. I hope you learned a lesson today about being prepared now that you’re an adult. Anything important requires preparation.

CB: Yeah, whatever. Will you bring me back this afternoon to take the test again?

MJF: Naw, probably not.

I did not take him back that afternoon, in fact, I didn’t take him back at all. I made him find a ride to retake the test and he did, ultimately pass it. After doing the unthinkable: Studying.

Moral of the story: When at first you don’t succeed, try doing it the way your mom told you to in the first place.

This came to mind the other day, when my friend was telling me she’s preparing to drive her son to take his written test. He’s 20 years old and hasn’t bothered to get a license yet. Life is different for our children these days, I remember lining up on my 16th birthday to get mine, unable to wait even a single extra day.

Of course, I’d already taken a driver training course in school, and even though I hated the teacher, hey, it was free.

Outside of major cities like New York, where many people never learned how to drive, driving was a fairly homogenous affair back then. You took lessons in school and then queued up on your 16th birthday to get your golden ticket to adulthood.

Then, you borrowed your parents’ car, brought it home empty of gas, and wrecked it at least once in the first year.

That’s from Auto Club statistics, by the way, that show most new drivers have a wreck in their first year. I was no exception and I’m grateful to be alive, because my mother nearly killed me when I totaled her elderly-but-still-serviceable Toyota Corona.

I’d had my drivers license about four minutes – or so it seemed – when I borrowed my mom’s car and then promptly hit a dump truck. It did nothing to the dump truck. I hit the truck’s tire, and didn’t even flatten it. My mom’s car was totaled.

The cop who arrived to survey the damage burst out laughing when he saw my crestfallen face. “This your mom’s car?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Are you going to get in a lot of trouble when you get home?”

I nodded again.

“OK,  well, technically I should give you a ticket because you failed to yield right of way, but since you did no damage at all to the other vehicle, and you’re already in trouble, I won’t write you a citation.”

I had the car, which was now artistically twisted into new shapes, towed to our nearby driveway, and waited for the execution. No one was home yet, so I had time to think about how I might die.

Let’s just say, I wasn’t summarily executed, but I didn’t drive again for a long time. And, when I did, it was a car that I bought myself with my own money.

I never told my teenagers this story so, shhhh, don’t tell them. Because I didn’t want to suggest to them it’s possible to wreck your mother’s car and live to tell the tale.

Nowadays, they both have their licenses, so I have something new to worry about every day of my life.

And I feel badly that I never taught them to drive a stick shift. I suppose that’s something of a lost art these days. I gave up my own manual transmission car when my leg got tired of shifting gears in traffic, and so I have nothing on which to teach them.

But if they ever get cast on TV’s “The Amazing Race” they’ll need to learn to drive a stick, or they won’t be able to win the million dollars.

And, in some countries, it costs twice as much to rent an automatic as a stick.

These are the things that keep me up at night, my friends. First World problems, to be sure. That’s why it’s good to visit countries where people barely subsist. It puts things into perspective.

Yeah, you were late for your massage but, hey, you don’t have to live in a hut with no plumbing.

Your kids can’t drive a stick, but, hey, they can drive instead of walking. And they’re not riding bikes hauling 30 pounds of firewood on their backs.

Life is good, most of the time. Even with teenagers.

The Civil War barely affected California, which had been a state for just a handful of years and was separated from the conflict’s many battlefields by thousands of miles.

That means any live Civil War re-creation here brings to life a major historical event that’s a routine part of tourism and local lore for dozens of states to our east but is, for us, out of the ordinary.

So Maverick Theater’s upcoming staging of “The Killer Angels: Soldiers of Gettysburg” will literally bring the Civil War right to Orange County, many of whose residents have only read about the war or seen it depicted in TV and cinematic movies or documentaries but not visited its battlefields firsthand.

In fact, creating a new live stage version of one of the war’s crucial battles was first and foremost in the mind of Brian Newell, the Fullerton theater’s founder, when he visited Gettysburg National Military Park last summer during a vacation with his family.

A park ranger giving a tour of the location of the Battle of Little Round Top cited “The Killer Angels,” a 1974 historical novel by Michael Shaara that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The ranger’s description of the novel intrigued Newell – notably, how it created a hero out of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a college professor from Maine who for three days in July 1863 commanded 380 Union soldiers at Little Round Top and held off a seemingly overwhelming force of nearly 2,000 Confederate soldiers.

Newell stopped by the gift shop in the park’s museum and visitor center and purchased the novel, which he began reading each night throughout his vacation. Drawn from diaries, journals, letters and memoirs, Shaara’s book, Newell said, “provides great insight” into the Battle of Gettysburg – “not only what was happening on the battlefield, but also what those who fought it were thinking, seeing and feeling and why they joined the conflict.”

Newell said the book’s story and characters “felt just like one of Shakespeare’s historical plays,” and before he finished reading it, he “knew it could be a great play.”

The producer, director and designer’s next step was to obtain the rights to adapt the novel for the stage. Newell learned that the book’s rights passed to Shaara’s son Jeff following the author’s death in 1988, so he wrote a letter asking permission.

Newell says that upon receiving his letter, Jeff Shaara phoned him to say he found the idea of a live play intriguing. Newell said he had only to outline his vision and concepts for creating a dramatic historical play from the novel for the adaptation rights to be granted.

To adapt the novel, Newell said he “went through all 336 pages and pulled all of the dialogue that Shaara had written. I then began to rearrange the dialogue into scenes. What remained is about 85 percent of what’s in the novel.”

“I was afraid if I mentioned all of the officers, the audience would be overwhelmed, so I focused only on the lead characters and their aides,” Newell said, noting that he wound up with 25 roles. Even with his omissions, he said he was able to retain “every part of what I had originally envisioned in the play.”

In describing the novel – the quintessential account of one of the war’s most crucial battles and the source of the epic 1993 theatrical film “Gettysburg” – Newell echoes others who have read it, calling it “powerful” and “a masterpiece” through which “audiences become an eyewitness to history.”

His goal in staging “The Killer Angels” is “to bring the novel to life with performers in an intimate staging that focuses on the character-driven story” – a tale told from the perspective of “various protagonists” such as Chamberlain and generals James Longstreet, John Buford, Lewis Armistead, George Pickett and Robert E. Lee.

Since he founded Maverick Theater 15 years ago, Newell has adapted many movies or novels for the stage, including “The Manchurian Candidate” and cult classics such as “Night of the Living Dead” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”

Newell’s new stage version gets its world premiere on Friday, May 5, with a total of 20 performances through June 24. After spending eight months creating the script, Newell is also directing it, having cast 13 actors to fill the play’s 25 roles. He’s also principal designer of the sets, costumes, lighting and sound effects.

Paying particular attention to the show’s costumes, Newell worked closely with a company in Idaho “that produces authentic uniforms especially for use by Civil War re-enactors” so that “my guys will look like they just came off the battlefield.”

“Fully aware” that some of his prospective audience members will be Civil War enthusiasts whose knowledge of the war may eclipse his own, while others may be unfamiliar with this pivotal chapter in American history, Newell said Maverick’s newest original play “will be highly enjoyable for both.”

‘The Killer Angels: Soldiers of Gettysburg’

When: Friday, May 5 through June 24. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays starting May 14
Where: Maverick Theater, 110 E. Walnut Avenue, Fullerton
Tickets: $25 ($10 students with current I.D.)
Suitability: All ages
Information: 714-526-7070, mavericktheater.com

The contract for television and film writers has expired without an indication of whether a strike is imminent that could send some popular TV shows into immediate reruns.

The Writers Guild of America and producers have been negotiating since March 13, with health care and compensation at the center of the on-and-off contract talks. The current deal expired at just after midnight Tuesday.

Guild members voted overwhelmingly last month to authorize a strike, and the WGA could call for an immediate walkout Tuesday. But no official communication came from either side indicating the next move.

If the Guild, which represents those who write for TV and film, can’t reach a new contract or agree to extend the negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios, the writers will go out on strike for the first time in nearly a decade.

Over the weekend and throughout Monday, there had been conflicting reports — which ranged from optimism about an imminent deal to reports of a memo telling writers to plan on hitting the picket lines Tuesday — but little concrete news.

Representatives for the writers and producers are engaged in a media blackout, meaning it is unclear how far apart the sides remain or how likely a strike will be called.

At the heart of the impasse between writers and producers are issues such as the union’s health plan, which faces a deficit, its pension plan and provisions for paying writers what they believe they should get in a landscape that has changed dramatically in recent years with shortening of seasons from 20-plus episodes to 10 or 13, cutting the amount of money they’ve received under per-episode paychecks.

In 2007 and early 2008, a 100-day writers strike halted productions on numerous shows, led to a shortened television season and even affected major film releases.

The dispute is driven in large part by shifts in how television is consumed, with streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon joining broadcast and cable TV and garnering viewers, critical and audience love, and awards.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

In the 10 years since she opened The Sugar Mill shop on Harbour Island, and then in 2015 an e-commerce and luxury direct sales operation propelled by stylish, well-traveled women much like herself, India Hicks has always been in the business of selling good taste. Now she is using that sharp eye for the Curated Capsule Collections, quarterly debuts of design collaborations with brands like Finlay & Co., Dempsey & Carroll, Jonathan Adler and Day Birger et Mikkelsen.
The first of these partnerships with India Hicks Inc. is set for May 3 with the introduction of limited-edition Finlay & Co. sunglasses. As will be the case with the other partners, items will only be available for a limited time while supplies last. Even Christian Louboutin has reached out, looking to partner for the launch of one of his beauty products, Hicks said.
Reluctant as she is to even use the term “direct sales,” Hicks has mastered its at-home appeal with her ambassadors, who have helped cultivate a core audience of women between the ages of 35 and 60. On average about 140,000 women see the India Hicks assortment at these events each month. Declining to comment on annual sales, Hicks said, “There is

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