NEW YORK (Reuters) - California's growing reliance on natural gas to fuel its power plants will increase and power prices will remain elevated following Southern California Edison's decision to retire a crippled nuclear power plant.

Both reactors at the 2,150-megawatt (MW) San Onofre plant will be permanently closed due to uncertainty over the cost and timing of restarting one of the units, said SCE, a unit of California energy company Edison International, on Friday.

While the grid agency has warned that the loss of San Onofre could cause rolling outages this summer as use of air conditioners soars, old and new power plants fueled by natural gas will likely pick up the slack.

"Any time you have a large plant closure, it affects both existing plants as well as future planning to replace the energy the plant was producing," said John Chillemi, west region president of NRG Energy Inc, which has more than 5,000 MW of gas-fired generation in California at 11 sites.

"I can tell you that when (San Onofre) first went off-line, NRG experienced increases in power generation at our southern California-based energy stations," said Chillemi.

Because the San Onofre reactors have been shut since January 2012, analysts said there should be little immediate impact to electricity or gas markets from SCE's decision not to seek regulatory approval to restart the nuclear plant.

"We kind of knew San Onofre might not come back this summer. Now we know for certain," said Paul Patterson, energy analyst at Glenrock Associates in New York.

SHUT DOWN TO KEEP PRICES ELEVATED

The year-long nuclear outage has already kept California wholesale prices higher than they should have been, according to an annual report from the grid's department of market monitoring.

Without San Onofre's output, the state relied on more expensive gas-fired generation and experienced significantly higher grid congestion costs that were borne by all customers, not just those in Southern California, the report said.

Thanks to an abundant supply of cheap U.S. natural gas produced from shale and California's ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gas now supplies more than 60 percent of the state's power, up from 50 percent in 2000. Hydro, renewables and nuclear power make up the balance, according to federal data.

San Onofre produced enough power to supply more than a million average California homes and replacing its output could add roughly 360 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas demand for the state, said energy analyst Teri Viswanath of BNP Paribas in New York.

Loss of the San Onofre plant and increased reliance on natural gas will challenge California's effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Analysts said the state must now make sure the grid remains reliable without San Onofre. The plant not only supplied megawatts but allowed much-needed power from outside the state to flow to Southern California.

"All would breathe easier if more generating capacity were available in Southern California," said Hugh Wynne, senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co in New York.

This summer, companies completed several grid upgrades to help avoid potential rolling outage conditions in Southern California.

In addition, programs to curb electric use during periods of high demand have been expanded.

NEW PLANTS COMING ONLINE

In Southern California alone, new generation includes three gas-fired plants - Edison Mission's 500-MW Walnut Creek plant and Competitive Power Venture's 850-MW Sentinel plant. NRG's 550-MW El Segundo plant is expected to be in service soon.

In addition to new solar plants under development, Chillemi said NRG has other projects waiting in the wings.

"We have projects in advanced development in Southern California like the Carlsbad Energy Center and expansion at El Segundo that could help meet the need," Chillemi said.

SCE officials said talks about how to replace the San Onofre generation have already begun with the grid agency and the public utility commission, but gave no details.

Calpine Corp, another big California generator with almost 6,000 MW of gas and renewable generation in the state, is building two gas-fired plants - the 120-MW Los Esteros and the 464-MW Russell City.

A spokeswoman for Dynegy Inc said the company has been looking at a possible repowering of its existing 165-MW Oakland facility in Northern California.

AES Corp also has plans to replace some of its older generating units with more efficient units. Officials at AES were not immediately available for comment.

(Additional reporting by Eileen O'Grady in Houston and Jeanine Prezioso in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Obama today nominated three judges for the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals despite GOP filibuster threats. The White House threatened to veto a House GOP spending bill that makes cuts in line with the Republicans' budget, setting the stage for a possible political standoff this fall, and the administration reasserted its faith in Attorney General Eric Holder, a perennial target for the president's opponents.

Whether the White House's tactics will be effective remains to be seen. Republicans say they're committed to following investigations into the controversies wherever they may lead, and the president faces a compressed time frame in his second term to pursue policy initiatives.

But here are three signs suggesting the White House is trying to change the subject after being battered in the media for the last several weeks.

1. Obama all but dared Senate Republicans to a filibuster showdown over judges. Introducing Patricia Ann Millett, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Wilkins, Obama bemoaned that the D.C. Circuit Court (the second-highest in the country) is short-staffed. With three vacancies on the 11-judge court, the president's Rose Garden announcement comes as Republican lawmakers say the president is trying to "pack" the court.

Even before Obama announced his appointees, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassleythe nominations as "reminiscent of FDR's era," an epithet meant to suggest the White House is trying to pack the court with political allies. On Tuesday, Obama sounded a defiant tone, criticizing the GOP for blocking judicial nominations. He recounted how he withdrew Caitlin Halligan's nomination for the appeals court after a two-and-a-half-year confirmation wait. "It has to stop. Too much of the people's business is at stake," Obama said.

2. Obama two House appropriations bills. These measures set funding for the Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs departments. The veto threat is a signal to Republicans that the president remains opposed to spending cuts assumed in the House-passed budget engineered by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. That budget assumes across-the-board cuts associated with sequestration will remain in effect. Democrats, though, want to replace those cuts with savings elsewhere, according to . The veto threat is also significant because it raises the stakes heading into the new fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, when the government could face a possible shutdown and the treasury will reach its borrowing limit. The GOP legislation "would hurt our economy and require draconian cuts to middle-class priorities," the .

3. The White House is casting critics as partisan. Over the weekend, former White House adviser David Plouffe lashed out at House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, dredging up decades-old allegations against the California Republican. "Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today," Plouffe tweeted. Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough lent crucial support to embattled Attorney General Eric Holder, with his spokesman telling , Holder "has the intellect, experience and integrity to efficiently run the Department of Justice and not get distracted by the partisans who seem more interested in launching political attacks."

The eggs belong to Torvosaurus, a T. rex-like predator that stalked the late Jurassic some 150 million years ago. Torvosaurus grew to be around 30 feet (9 meters) long, but the fragmented embryos discovered in Portugal were probably only about 6 inches (15 centimeters) in length.

"This is shedding some light on the early stages of the development of these types of dinosaurs," said Ricardo Arajo, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at Southern Methodist University in Texas. []

A surprising find

The crushed clutch of eggs was found in 2005 by amateur fossil-hunter and fossil cast-maker Art Walen, who was on an annual vacation to the fossil-rich Lourinh Formation in western Portugal.

"He just stumbled across some eggshells, and he traced the eggshells up the cliffs and he found there were not only isolated eggshells, there was also an entire nest up there," Arajo told LiveScience.

Paleontologists from the Museu da Lourinh excavated the nest, which researchers first assumed belonged to a . Even in the field, however, the paleontologists began to think they might have something very different on their hands. The eggs' surfaces were ornamented with a strange, almost honeycomb-like pattern that was quite distinct from anything the researchers had ever seen, Arajo said.

Once the specimen was excavated and brought to the museum for preparation, the researchers got another surprise: There were embryo bones mixed in with the crushed eggs.

Such a find is "extremely rare," Arajo said. "There's probably a handful of situations like this in the world."

Dinosaur development

The bones enabled the researchers to link the nest back to a specific species of dinosaur. Torvosaurus was a theropod, a group that includes bothand modern birds. The specimens are the earliest theropod embryos ever found.

They're also the most primitive, Arajo said. Torvosaurus is on an early branch of the dinosaur family tree, making them "basal theropods," or very early examples of the group. So while(including some found recently in China) date back to earlier eras, Arajo said, the new discoveries are the most primitive in terms of dinosaur evolutionary relationships.

The find reveals some secrets of egg evolution. Modern bird eggs are made up of three layers, Arajo said, and most dinosaur eggs have two layers. The Torvosaurus eggs are so primitive that they have just one layer.

"This is the first evidence for a one-layered eggshell for theropod dinosaurs ever found," Arajo said.

The exceptionally preserved shells are marked by a series of wide, interconnected pores. Pores allow the eggs to "breathe," and their size depends on whether the eggs are exposed to moisture or dry air. The size and shape of the Torvosaurus egg pores suggest they were buried in a moist environment for incubation, Arajo said.

He and his colleagues report the findings today (May 30) in the journal .

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Critics said the dark mysteries, mind-bending codes and history-laced tourism in "Inferno" will thrill Brown devotees, but panned the U.S. author for passages they said were more suited to a Hollywood film script than a novel.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon returns in this latest sequel to the blockbuster book and film franchise to follow a trail of clues about 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri across Florence, Venice and Istanbul in a race to save the world from a deadly artificial plague.

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin said the novel has a shaky opening that appears to put Brown's "brainiac franchise" in trouble, but recovers swiftly.

"To the great relief of anyone who enjoys him, Mr. Brown winds up not only laying a breadcrumb trail of clues about Dante (this is "Inferno," after all) but also playing games with time, gender, identity, famous tourist attractions and futuristic medicine," she wrote.

Sales of the book reached the highest level of customer pre-orders at retailer Waterstones since the release of Harry Potter author JK Rowling's adult fiction "The Casual Vacancy" last year.

The Independent newspaper's Boyd Tonkin called the novel "clunky but clever" in a review that asks whether Brown can make a go of one of the oldest plots in fiction - mad scientist threatens world with doom machine.

"Can Brown re-engineer these over-familiar devices of outbreak, pestilence and contagion into a viable organism? However clunkily, he can," Tonkin writes.

But Financial Times reviewer AN Wilson panned "Inferno" as a "nonsensical story" loaded with "scientific gobbledygook" and pointing out Brown's repetitive reliance on the fame of every historical site Langdon comes across.

"The prof and his doctor race past 'Florence's famed Cathedral', and Vasari's 'famed Studiolo', not forgetting the 'world-famous Uffizi Gallery'," Wilson wrote.

"Inferno reads less like a novel than a 'treatment' for a thriller film."

Back in America, USA Today's Brian Truitt offers Brown's novel three and a half stars out of four in a review that calls the book "one hell of a good read".

"Brown has a definite formula in place for putting Langdon through his paces, but watching him go through hell is about as close as a book can come to a summertime cinematic blockbuster," Truitt wrote.

Brown's religion-themed mystery novel "The Da Vinci Code," was published in 2003 and was made into a hit film starring Tom Hanks. It spent more than a year at the top the New York Times bestseller list.

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang; Writing by Paul Casciato; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)