If you do a quick Google search You’ll see the phrase “There was no threat to public health or safety” combined with “Vermont Yankee” pops up quite a bit.  It popped up again yesterday:

“The leak was isolated,” Smith wrote. “The valve has been replaced and the LCO has ended. There was no threat to public health or safety and there was no leak to the environment.”

You might think that this is in reference to another, previously reported, leak.  That, however, would be incorrect.  This time, it was a new leak on Tuesday, June 8th, which involved a valve releasing 1.6 gallons per minute into the containment building.  According to reports, it lasted under six hours.

But I want to get back to that phrase “no threat.”  

A threat doesn’t have to be immediate to exist.  There might not have been an immediate threat from this particular leak, but at this point, a power plant of the nature of Vermont Yankee, which has operated beyond its expected life cycle?  That’s a threat.  Every single minute of operation on the part of this plant is a threat, and every new leak, spill, equipment failure?  That’s not a new threat.  That’s just an illustration of the threat that is a constant issue for us.

It’s really time to move forward and find a new source of power for this state (and all the places VY exports it to).  This is just ridiculous.

In yesterday’s Brattleboro Reformer, there was this gem:

According to the PSB, the false testimony by Entergy witnesses was sufficiently damaging enough to merit sanctions. The New Orleans-based company, which operates the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon, will have to reimburse costs to the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, the New England Coalition and the Windham Regional Commission attorney fees and other legal costs related to the plant’s misrepresentations about whether it had underground pipes carrying radioactive materials.

I don’t expect this to carry a whole lot of teeth.  The PSB’s interest in actually enforcing anything related to VY is relatively timid.  This seems to me to be more of a political distancing move than anything else, like politicians who have been in the pocket of big oil for decades suddenly saying “you know, maybe we should encourage these companies to be a little more responsible” a month after a catastrophic oil spill.

But still, it’s nice to see the PSB at least pretending to give a damn about truth and accuracy.  Took them long enough, but still…

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

“I will not agree to the site monitoring or the establishment of a database with the ability to collect such information about our staff, as I believe it undermines the trust we have developed and is, in fact, counter to the establishment of a productive work environment,” Spaulding wrote.

I agree with this completely.  As a state, we’ve wasted over $100,000 on this technology, and it’s a fairly crappy way to treat your employees.

But kind of buried down the line in this story is the following statement:

Spaulding said he will allow the monitoring technology to be used, but only he and his deputy will be privy to the data.

So it’s not that he thinks it’s a problem to undermine the trust he’s developed with his staff.  It’s just that he doesn’t want the human resources department to undermine it.  He… wants to do all the undermining himself?

Seriously?  Is this a solution?

Sometimes the day just gets a little odd:

It was a bit of a surprise to look out the kitchen window and see a red [oops: grey, not red –Julie] fox under the bird feeders.  Our feeders are a bit of a distance from the house and our screens don’t come off our windows, so this was the best I could do of photographing the fox thorough a screen window, but I think it came out pretty well.

Here’s a pair of Tom Turkeys that we found displaying on our way to a bird walk a few weeks ago:

Last night I recorded this:

and this:

Last week we were out Kayaking and I managed to get this photo:

I’d never tried getting a photo from a Kayak before.  It was cool, but a little scary and tricky.  Without realizing it I started drifting towards a nest and had to act very fast not to intrude on their territory.  

Yesterday, I was working on some web design work on the porch.  As usual, I made sure I had my camera.  In the course of about half an hour I saw a Baltimore Oriole, a Pileated Woodpecker, an American Redstart, a Red-Eyed Vireo, and this black and white warbler:

But really, I’m writing to post about the new line of note cards I’ve developed, including:

You can see them all at my new site, http://chickadeecards.com/

I’ve tried some new stuff on that site: a javascript which allows for previewing of the cards when you mouseover the thumbnail (does not work on IE 8 or handheld browsers) and some other cool bells and whistles, but I’m especially proud of figuring out how to make the site look completely different on an iPod than it does on a desktop browser.  

Feel free to check out the site, give feedback on the usability, etc.

In the meantime, I am getting heavily back into music again and doing major skill honing, learning how to program some design stuff I didn’t know was possible– learning a lot more about CSS then I knew a month ago– dramatically improving my skills with complex cross join sql queries– I’ll find some new work eventually, and I’ve still got part time work teaching and picked up a new web client last week, so I’m good, and kind of enjoying the Summer vacation.

One of the very fun random things I learned how to do this week is to take a collection of images and combine them into a collage.  If you check out the links from any of those photos, you’ll see a website banner at the top (this won’t happen on iPods and small-scale browsers but on desktops it should be fine, except possibly for IE 8).  Every time you reload the site you’ll get a slightly different version of that banner.  The bird image sequence is chosen at random.  I did the same thing with a different banner for night photography:

http://juliesmagiclightshow.co…

What do you guys think.  Is this a fair ad?

Per today’s Keene Sentinel, Vermont Yankee had to do an “automatic shutdown.”  

But we don’t need to worry ’cause “no radiation has been released, according to spokesman Laurence M. Smith.”

Well, I feel better.  

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

A Connecticut River fish caught four miles upstream from the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor this winter tested positive for low levels of strontium-90, a highly dangerous radioactive isotope recently confirmed in soil outside the plant.

But the Department of Health said Monday that the fish’s strontium-90 was not related to this winter’s radioactive leak at Vermont Yankee, and state officials attributed the strontium to atmospheric testing in the 1960s and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 20 years ago, which spread radioactive fallout even as far away as Vermont.

But not to worry:

“Even if in edible portions, there is no expected, measurable health risk from the consumption of fish contaminated from these extremely low, fallout-derived quantities of strontium-90,”

See?  Everything’s just fine.

Wonder how they know where the SR-90 is coming from?

Per yesterday’s Times Argus:

The jury convicted 40-year-old Joseph McCarthy, of Essex, in the September 2008 death of neighbor John Reiss. Police never determined who in the group of men firing weapons on a backyard range fired the fatal bullet. Prosecutors said McCarthy was reckless in setting up the range and should be held liable.

I will restate this: we do not know who fired the shot that killed Reiss, but we know that McCarthy set up a situation which was directly attributable to the death of Reiss even if he did not pull the trigger.

This is justice.  You create a situation which places someone else in danger and you are responsible for it.

So here’s my question, and I think it’s a fairly simple one:

Why does British Petroleum have more rights than Joseph McCarthy?

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Entergy Nuclear praise for its response to the radioactive tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee reactor earlier this year, but said the company didn’t do nearly enough to prevent such a leak according to standards set by the nuclear industry.

Read the whole piece.  The NRC (absurdly, but that’s not the point) praises the “quick” response from VY to the leak, but that’s pretty much an extremely small piece of the article.  The rest of it talks about how the NRC basically slams Yankee for having poor enough standards to have allowed the leak to take place in the first place.

But the headline does not suggest this.

What is the title for this piece?

It’s “NRC praises Entergy for tritium leak response”

The article is excellent.  The headline is just plain hackery.

The Savannah Sparrow may be one of my favorite sparrows, and it’s difficult to explain exactly why.  It might have something to do with their similarity to other, more common sparrows.  I can be out looking at birds and see this perfectly normal song sparrow or something like a song sparrow when I suddenly catch a flash of bright yellow eyebrow or a buzzy insectoid note mixed in with their sing song call and know I’ve got something considerably less common.  

They are strikingly beautiful birds, but this year they’ve taken on a new meaning for me.

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece, Alive about living on when others have passed.

I didn’t write about one aspect of death then, because I wasn’t ready to form it into words yet.

Recently, a casual friend of mine passed away.  I’m not going to go into a lot of details here– it’s someone I worked with on projects on occasion and a lot of people from work knew her far longer and better than I did, but I have felt this profound sense of inability since her death.  Usually, when someone I know very well dies, I find ways to process it, to honor them in ways that are meaningful and powerful.  In this case, I didn’t feel like I knew her well enough to know how to do that.

The situation presented itself.  I didn’t know this at the time but she really loved my photography, and I mean, raved about it to other people.  She never told me this, which is kind of like her.  Not knowing this, I had tried to get her one of my photos when she was ill (I made one photo into Christmas cards and wanted to make sure she got one), not knowing at the time how ill she was.  She died shortly after, and I don’t know if she ever did get the card.

Someone I don’t know very well approached me at work this week.  She wanted to know if I had a photo I could provide for them.  They’re presenting a gift to her husband, from all of us, and they thought one of my photos would be ideal.

I hadn’t even thought of it at the time, I’d taken the photo above during break.  Earlier in the week, I’d sent them a few photos as ideas.  On Friday I thought about it and said, how about this one?  The sparrow was in one of the trees a group of us planted last fall.  As part of the ceremony where we present the photo, we’re planting a tree on her behalf.  It just seems so right: a bird found on our facilities, in a tree we’d planted, and truly just one of the most spectacularly beautiful photos I’ve ever taken.  

I feel like, for the first time since she died, I have something I can do for her that’s meaningful, personal and appropriate.  

So this week’s Dawn Chorus is dedicated to Susan, whom I didn’t know as well as I’d have liked.  If we’d had more time, I’m sure we would have become really great friends, and I’m sorry you had to leave this world so soon.  

So onto the birds.  I’ve got some really nice photos of Black-Capped Chickadees before but there is something about the colors in this one that I find really compelling

One of the nice things about the new camera is how many frames per second I can get: 5.5 frames/second is a LOT more opportunity for action shots than 3 f/s, and it lets me get photos like this on occasion:

See above; usually when a bird is hopping from one branch to another I just get the bird on one branch and then the other.  Now sometimes I can get the in-between:

On, and speaking of strikingly beautiful birds:

I’ve been trying to get a photo of a Louisiana Waterthrush for years now.  I finally found one within walking distance of my house.  Heard, then spotted, then photographed.  Yay life birds!

Anyone able to help me ID these mystery Sparrows?

These Wood Ducks were VERY far away.  I’m amazed I got any photo of them at all:

Common Merganser

Long-tailed duck

Northern Flicker

Northern Harrier

Northern Pintail

Pilleated Woodpecker

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

red-tailed hawk

As usual, these are all smaller versions; the full sized photos with details (where and when taken, which camera I used, etc.) are available by clicking on them.  

Oh, and I’ve added something new to the site: one of those “people who liked this photo also liked…” lists below the photo.  I’m curious how that works for everyone.  

Hope you enjoyed the story and the photos.  I feel like I’m finally getting to the point of pushing my photographic talent to a new level with some of the shots I’ve been getting lately.