Both from today’s Rutland Herald:

The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be “a very large area” at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.

…and…

Williams said Entergy Nuclear investigators were working on a strategy for excavating the area next to the well with the highest contamination levels.

Let’s just think about that for a moment: they are “working on a strategy.”

How long has this been going on now?  Doesn’t it seem logical that we’d be at the point by now where someone actually had a strategy?

Apparently, CBS thinks that the sight of two men kissing is enough that it would send football fans running and screaming if they were to air it during the Superbowl.

CBS rejected this dating service ad (which does feature two men making out) for the Superbowl, but is willing to run an advocacy ad from the anti-gay Focus on the Family. The rejected ad is not obscene or even very sexual in its nature. It’s far more tame than a lot of prime-time ads:

Cowards.

(h/t Daily Kos)

Or, specifically, “*more* than 40,” which is as nice a way of putting it as “there is no immediate danger.”  Per Susan Smallheer in today’s Rutland Herald:

There are more than 40 buried pipes containing radionuclides at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor, according to a document Entergy Nuclear submitted Monday to the Vermont Public Service Board.

A year ago, the company’s vice president of operations and the site vice president in charge of the Vernon reactor said there were none.

Now, you would think, that pretty much says it all, but it gets better.  VY apparently can’t decide whether it wants to be seen as fraudulent or incompetent:

One of the executives, Jay Thayer, has since publicly corrected his statement.

The company… said there was a difference between underground piping and underground vaults, which often contain multiple pipes, according to company spokesman Robert Williams.

“No one is saying the company didn’t know” there were buried pipes containing radionuclides, Williams said, attributing the problem to lack of communication within the company and “conflicting assumptions.”

Arnie Gundersen, however, brilliantly puts this in proper perspective:

“ENVY is saying that if you die and you are put directly in the ground with dirt on top of you, you are buried. But if you die and are put in a casket, you are not buried, but you are ‘underground,'” Gundersen said.

So let’s see if we can simplify this:

The company either lied about the pipes or didn’t understand the nature of the legal requirements for disclosure of them.  

Then, when it got caught glowing-green handed, it now wants to clarify matters.  

It then used a fairly complicated set of verbal parsings to justify its previous “lack of communication” in the prior case.

And, of course, we’re supposed to just ignore all this because it’s more expensive to get our fuel elsewhere.

Did you ever go to a mechanic who, you find out after the fact, didn’t understand how your car worked?  Ever go to a mechanic who, you find out after the fact, lied to you about how your car worked?

Did you ever go back?

Per the Times Argus:

Extraordinarily high levels of radioactive water was discovered in a trench at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant this week, lawmakers revealed Wednesday.

Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, told reporters that surface water discovered in a trench at the site of the Vernon nuclear reactor has tested positive for tritium, with levels ranging from 1-2 million picocuries per liter.

That’s about 100 times the amount of the radioactive isotope discovered late last year in groundwater surrounding Vermont Yankee.

What’s recognized as a “safe” level of Tritium?

20,000.

Where is all this excess radiation coming from?

We.  Don’t.  Know.

Don’t you feel better?

(much more detailed update from Maggie after the fold)

Update by Maggie

From the Brattleboro Reformer

100 gallons of tritium-laced water found at Vermont Yankee

According to Bob Audette at the Brattleboro Reformer,

Entergy told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this afternoon that it had found about 100 gallons of free-standing water in a room in the radioactive waste building at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon.

When it was tested, said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC, the concentration of tritium was about 2 million picocuries per liter.

According to Audette,

While Yankee was pumping the water out of the rad-waste building, about 60 more gallons washed into the room. The rad-waste building is between two wells that have tested positive for tritium.

“It is too early to determine if the rad-waste building might be the source of the groundwater contamination,” said Sheehan. “The company will have to investigate that further.”

Ironically most of the Vermont Press has not been given the complete story.  One journalist informed me that Department of Health State Radiological Health Chief Bill Irwin and members of the DPS have known about the increased leakage and additional site contamination for several days, all the while attempting to tell the press that what leakage that is out there is meaningless and of no threat to public health and safety.

You may also see a longer story here in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponlin…

Of course the New York Times would jump on this story because New Yorkers are dealing with their own leaking Entergy nuke saga at the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant less than 40 miles outside New York City.

As part of the NRC’s investigation into the contaminated wells and now the water in the rad-waste building, it is sending a health physicist to the plant next week to review the company’s latest plans and actions to deal with the tritium, said Sheehan.

First piece of good news is that this is short-lived.  The guy has to run for reelection again in 2010 and the odds of him being able to keep his seat once he has an actual record in the Senate is relatively slim, especially in a presidential year.

The second piece of good news is that it has the potential to wake up Democrats to the fact that they’re blowing this thing.

The third piece of good news is that it completely eliminates any power that Lieberman had.  He’s no longer the magical 60th vote.  He’s no longer the one who can stop a filibuster.  He’s just one more guy who annoys everyone.

The fourth piece of good news is that this might actually clue us in to the fact that absolutely nothing will pass if we allow Republicans to block every single piece of legislation.  They will not help us.  They will never help us.  The best we can hope for is that they will water everything down to the extent that no one likes it and then decide they still don’t want to support it.  

The fifth piece of good news is that it is a nice and solid reminder to us that even if you are high up in the polls, it’s not wise to take a vacation in the middle of a very short election season.  

The danger: if we decide that the way to win things in the future is to act more like teabaggers, we are screwed.  We went down that road after ’94 and it was a big, big (and kind of obvious) mistake.  Furthermore, if we use this as an excuse to retreat from a liberal legislative agenda rather than push harder for it, we are similarly screwed.  People don’t come out to vote if they’re not inspired.

Maybe this will wake Democrats up and help us remember that even if we have a lot of minority opposition, that we still have challenges that we have to face, and that doesn’t always mean allowing the Republicans to derail the process to get buy-in.  There’s already talk going on of using budget reconciliation to get health care passed, and maybe now there’s no choice.  

Sometimes there are clear and obvious reasons that birds wander into very unusual territory.  In the case of the Northern Hawk Owl, for example, they tend to get pushed south when their natural food supply is weak in North American Boreal Forest so they are pushed south.  

This is not a frequent occurrence, but it does happen from time to time.  Last year, there were Northern Hawk Owls spotted throughout New England when there hadn’t been one identified in the region for nearly a decade prior.  We also had enormous numbers of pine siskins routinely in our yard, when I’d never seen more than one or two at a time before.  (at one point, we counted over 150).

And then there’s this guy:

The bird doesn’t look that much like anything unusual, but the black-tailed gull is not a bird that hangs out in an entirely different part of the Atlantic.  It hangs out in an entirely different part of the Pacific and, for some reason, in October of 2005 it hung out in Lake Champlain (Eastern US, between Vermont and New York).  

I remember this in particular because it was when we first realized we weren’t just kind of into birding, but really into birding.  We drove more than 6 hours just to see an unusual gull, and we were really happy we did it.

But the next rare bird chase was the one that verified it.   The Western Reef Heron is a bird that has only been identified in the United States four times.  We went to Kittery, ME, to find it,  It took us the better part of the day.  We got there early and it wasn’t in its usual harbor.  But there were birders everywhere looking for it and that’s when we realized that birders are kind of awesome.  Not only did people help us with tips, people who recognized us from the morning pulled over to give us leads when they spotted us down the line.  When we finally found the bird and got good looks at it, it was entirely because other birders led us there.  I remember one point at which we had the bird, but it flew across the harbor.  Then someone spotted a group of birders on the other side of the water getting really excited, put his scope on them to see where they were looking and then we all ran to our cars (“to the birdmobile!”) to get to the new spot.  Eventually I got some photos of the bird:

notice that there are two birds in that photo.  The white morph of the western reef heron is extremely similar to the snowy egret shown next to it.  We suspect that it simply ended up with the wrong flock, following around a bunch of snowy egrets, assuming they were its kin.

Other birds are not unheard of, but very uncommon.  This rufous hummingbird, for example…

>

…is believed to be trending east.  We’re seeing more frequent sightings of them on our coast, but it was still a real treat to find one close to home:

Things get weirder when it comes to nesting behavior.  This Mississippi Kite not only decided to visit Newmarket, NH.  It actually decided to start a family.  It had an active nest in the area and successfully fledged chicks:

But right now, my favorite of these unusual migrants is the Sage Thrasher for one fairly simple reason: I saw my first one yesterday.  A Western Bird, for some reason, has shown up in Salisbury, MA.  Here it is feeding on juniper berries:

There are lots of reasons that birds end up off their usual paths.  In some cases, we have irruptions, which are mass migrations beyond the normal territory to look for stronger food sources (note the siskins I referenced before).  This is especially common when there is a boon year for a bird’s food source, followed by a weaker year produces larger numbers of birds than usual, with less food to share, forcing them into new territory.

But that’s generally a minor expansion: a few hundred miles further south than usual.   Crossing a whole continent?  A bird which winters in the Baja Peninsula showing up in frigid New England?  A Japanese bird showing up in Lake Champlain?

I don’t know what causes this.  It might be a bird that just wanders off its path.  It might be a bird that was taken as a pet and released.  It might simply be a bird having been stuck in a cargo hold for a couple days until it found a way out when the hold was opened.  

I really have no answers to this, but I love these opportunities to see things that are almost unheard of in my territory.  Sage Thrasher?  I vaguely remember having heard of one before but until this week, it was completely off my radar, and as of yesterday, I’ve got a new life bird.  

I’ll close with a photo I’ve posted many times before: the earlier referenced Northern Hawk Owl

(Just moving this up as a reminder; the show’s Saturday night. – promoted by JulieWaters)

This benefit concert is for the Greater Falls Warming Shelter.  Featured performers include Jesse Peters, Derrik Jordan, Vermont Timbre (Mike Mrowicki & Amelia Struthers) and Julie Waters.

It will take place at Emmanuel Episcopal Church (Stone Church) at 20 Church Street in Bellows Falls, VT.  It starts at 8.  Admission is by donation.

To me, music is transformative, and concerts like this illustrate that better than anything else I can think of; as musicians, we play, hopefully for money, but often just to be out there and share our craft.  There’s something about shows like this which push us to think about our music not just in terms of what we can get from it, but what we can give with it as well.

Music is a creative process, but not everyone follows their muse without getting scathed in some form.  Some of our most talented musicians have, at some point in their lives, ended up destitute, homeless or otherwise separated from the rest of society.  This concert is one small way some of us can honor those among us whose who have fallen from their expected path and who too often fall through the cracks, discarded by the world around them.  

Performer details after the fold.

Derrik Jordan has released many CDs of his original music as a singer-songwriter and also under the name SuperString Theory. He was recently commissioned to write a piece for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, “Odzihozo And The Lake,” which tells the ancient Abenaki creation story of Lake Champlain in music. It was performed in ten venues around the state in the fall of 2009.

Julie Waters is a folk artist in the truest tradition, weaving stories, motion and rhythm, creating lyrical poetry through the strings of her guitar. This is more than simply a creative approach to music. This is performance which turns on a dime, first evoking ancient modal melodies, and then suddenly sliding into a rock and roll beat which takes you straight into the 21st century.

Vermont Timbre — the singer-songwriting duo of Amelia Struthers and Mike Mrowicki , will be offering local musical produce as part of the concert to support  the Bellows  Falls  Winter Homeless  shelter. The two local performers began singing together in 2004 while working on the album, Love in Kindness. When Amelia was invited to combine her bright and clear voice to harmonize with Mike’s tender vocals, they instantly recognized a spark of musical alchemy.

Jesse Peters blends all his formative experiences into a musical approach that includes many different styles. He is flexible enough to play instrumental dinner music one day and jazz-rock with his trio the next. His writing style is similarly broad, with modern groove numbers interspersed with more traditional fingerpicked tunes, and a few rockers thrown in for good measure. Mixing it up like this keeps it interesting for both him and his audience.

Cosponsors of the shelter include United Church of Bellows Falls, Our Place Drop-in Center, Parks Place, Unitarian Church of Walpole, SEVCA (Southeastern Vt. Community Action), Rockingham Area Community Land Trust (RACLT), Chroma Technology, Youth Services.

If you would like to help advertise this event, please put up posters.  The poster can be downloaded here.  There is also an open facebook page that people can use to give themselves a reminder of the show or to invite others to attend.

This is a side by side picture of two very common hawks that can be seen, at various times, throughout the entire United States:

One is a Cooper’s Hawk, the other a Sharp-Shinned.  They look fairly similar, being both of the genus Accipiter.  Accipiters are generally defined by long tails for better maneuverability, along with long legs.  Unlike some birds of prey, they tend to be sneaky and ambush their prey, waiting in bushes or other hidden areas for smaller creatures (other birds or rodents, usually), rather than soaring from great heights and swooping down.

Can you tell which one is the coopers and which one is the sharp-shinned?

Read on…

The biggest and most obvious difference between the two birds is size.  Coopers hawks are bigger, in the 14″-20″ range, making them not that far from a crow’s size on either end.  Sharp-shinned hawks are in the 10″-14″ range, making some of them even smaller than a blue jay.

That said, size can be deceptive.  It’s not as easy to judge size in the field as people think, and even if you can, the smallest size of one bird matches the largest end of the other.  Size alone can’t give you a good ID.  There are, however, a couple other factors that are quite relevant.  

A friend of mine often says to think of the sharp-shinned as a track-star and the coopers as a football player: one’s sleeker than the other, and the “shoulders” tend to be less broad.  This is accurate in flight, but not as useful when the birds are stationary.  Furthermore, in the wintertime, birds often fluff themselves up (they can use their feathers to make pockets of heat) to keep warm, making comparisons of this nature complicated, though they do tend to work in flight.

I, however, use two specific things to help me tell the difference between the two birds: tail and belly.

First, let’s look at the sharp-shinned, the smaller of the two:

There are two things on this bird which immediately tell me it’s a sharpie: first, the feather pattern: there are patches of white on the stomach.  This doesn’t happen with coopers hawks.  They’ve got color all the way down.  

Second, the tip of the tail.  Notice how it’s shaped: it’s almost flat: no curve to it whatsoever.

Now let’s look at the coopers with those same concepts in mind:

Again, notice the belly: color all the way down– no patches of white until the legs themselves.  

Now notice the tail: rounded and well curved, like a semicircle.  

Related links:

• Coopers Hawk photos


• Sharp-shinned hawk photos

Hope you enjoyed the hawk lesson!

From today’s Rutland Herald, reporting on comments from Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood:

The rule calls for a strict review process… It envisions a 30-day public comment period when no snow is on the ground, so people can look at the route of the proposed trail and point out perceived environmental threats.

As has been pointed out, however…

Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, and chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said it was ironic that a cash-strapped agency with an already big to-do list would want to take on managing ATV riders’ use of state lands.

But on a certain level, all this is moot.  As was previously document on GMD:

ANR has no authority to propose natural area/State land ATV trail rules.  The General Assembly has not granted powers to ANR that enable unelected agency officials to adopt rules designating ATV trails on State land or in natural areas.

So why are they doing it?  Apparently, simply because no one’s stopped them yet.  

Lawsuit, anyone?

this year it’s “ClearLane.”

Just over a year ago. BP wrote up a piece about the “‘oatmeal-like’ mixture” being used by the Vermont Agency of Transportation.

This year, it’s ClearLane, which residents of Burlington have claimed causes physical pain to their dogs.  

Do we need to start issuing safety warnings when we de-ice our roads?