My Kites
February 26, 2012
Calligraphy by Margarete Dahlin
The poem is from my book, The Wilderness Within. I often see kites flying on the beach since the wind is right for them. The colors of the kites reminded me of Joseph and his coat of many colors. My father told me that story when I was quite young. I was surprised when Margarete Dahlin, a woman I had never met and who lives in Sweden purchased The Wilderness Within and made the wonderful calligraphy. So with books being available all over the planet via the internet and friends just a few keystrokes away, we do live in a wonderful time. Here is a print version of the poem shaped like a kite:
My
Kites
for my father
All my tethered kites tremble
cleave the wind with singing
looping, spiraling, weaving
gifts from my father:
heart red, ocean blue
goldfinch yellow
crocus purple
green of
leaping
goat:
stripesofJosep
h
’s
sp
len
did
coat
Relief Map of the Five Great Lakes
February 20, 2012
The Great Lakes are a flowing river of seas left behind by Ice Age glaciers that are nearly twenty percent of the world’s supply of fresh surface water; the world’s greatest freshwater system. The Great Lakes look and behave like oceans because of their great size.
Together, the Great Lakes cover an area equal to Scandinavia and have a coastline of 11,232 miles including connecting channels, mainland, and islands. Their shoreline is equal to almost 45 percent of the circumference of the earth.
Their waters descend from highest, coldest, and northernmost Lake Superior through the St. Mary’s River and the Soo Locks to fill Lakes Michigan and Huron, then flow through the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River into Lake Erie, then down the Niagara River and Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario.
Like water spilling from a series of basins, from higher to lower, the water follows gravity running a thousand more miles from the outlet of Lake Ontario through Canada’s St. Lawrence River dotted with more than 1,800 islands until their freshwater reaches and mingles with the Atlantic Ocean’s saltwater.
Excerpted from The Dynamic Great Lakes, available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and Amazon’s Kindle reader.
Palisades: Is it Safe?
February 15, 2012
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said problems at the Palisades plant do not pose an immediate safety threat, but show that the facility has underlying issues that need to be corrected. / STAN GREGG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Palisades nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan became one of the four worst-performing nuclear reactors in the U.S. — out of 104 — when federal regulators downgraded it Tuesday for the second time this year.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has finalized four safety violations against the plant since Jan. 3, and Palisades will now undergo extra safety inspections and more scrutiny to make sure managers find the root causes of problems and fix them.
The plant had five emergency shutdowns in 2011 because of human or equipment failures.
“The NRC has observed a decline at Palisades in the past year,” said Prema Chandrathil, spokeswoman for the NRC’s Chicago office. “We expect them to take action.”
The problems the NRC has found do not pose an immediate safety threat, but show that the facility has underlying issues that need to be corrected, she said.
Managers of Entergy Nuclear Operations, the company that bought Palisades from Consumers Energy in 2007, took the blame for the problems at an NRC hearing last month.
Entergy officials acknowledged that the plant has a poor safety culture, meaning its workers are not as risk-conscious as they should be.
The NRC puts plants into five performance categories. Most are in the best-performing top category, including, until recently, Palisades. As problems mount, a plant is downgraded a category. At each level, the NRC does more inspections.
Palisades has fallen from the top category to the third level of performance.
Only two other plants — the Perry Nuclear Power Plant’s Unit 1 generator near Cleveland and the Susquehannah Nuclear Power Plant’s Unit 1 generator in Berwick, Pa. — are in the same category. A fourth plant, Browns Ferry Unit I near Athens, Ala., is in the fourth category. A plant that hits the fifth, or bottom level, would be shut down.
The most significant violation at Palisades happened on Sept. 25. What began as an attempt to fix a burned-out light bulb on a door to an emergency airlock led to a serious incident that left the plant without half its electrical power.
A piece of equipment slipped while a worker was troubleshooting, causing an arc of electricity and a loss of power to some indicators in the panels that control the reactor. Signals went haywire, showing incorrect information, and the plant automatically shut down.
In taking part of the blame for that incident, plant manager Dave Hamilton said: “I apologize if I get emotional, but I could have killed somebody that weekend.”
Still, at the hearing last month, the company argued that the violations were less serious than the NRC claimed.
“At no time was the plant in an unsafe situation,” plant spokesman Mark Savage said Tuesday.
But in its letter to the plant Tuesday, the NRC said the agency looks at not only at what did happen, but what could have happened.
Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear group, said Palisades is risky to those who get drinking water from Lake Michigan, and it should be shut down. In addition to the September shutdown, the NRC has cited Palisades this year for other violations in 2010 and 2011:
• Oct. 23, 2010: A control room operator who was angry walked off his job without permission and without handing over his duties. The NRC issued a violation notice in late 2011. After mediation, the NRC, the company and the operator agreed to a series of steps that must be taken to prevent a repeat. Among them, the operator must write an article for an industry magazine discussing what he learned from the incident.
• May 10, 2011: A pump tripped after workers failed to follow correct maintenance procedures during an earlier outage and improperly greased a part. That failure led to one violation that downgraded Palisades one level on Jan. 3. The violation was of low to moderate significance.
• Aug. 9, 2011: A key water pump failed and the NRC determined the company was guilty of two violations because it had a similar pump failure in 2009, but didn’t figure out the root cause of that failure. Instead, the problem was repeated two years later. A coupling failed because of stress cracking and corrosion that the company should have found and fixed, the NRC said.
Chandrathil said the plant will remain downgraded for at least the first nine months of this year. Its status after that depends on the outcome of NRC inspections and any further violations.
Regulators will evaluate the effectiveness of the corrections Entergy makes before deciding whether to upgrade the plant’s status.
“We accept the violations,” said Savage, Entergy’s spokesman. He said the company had cooperated fully with the NRC and will continue to do so.
Contact Tina Lam: 313-222-6421 or tlam@freepress.com
Look Up: The American Bald Eagles Courtship
February 13, 2012
- The Dynamic Great Lakes
Look up. This is the time of year when eagles begin their spectacular courtship.
“Return of the Eagles
High above the sand dunes in West Michigan, a pair of American
bald eagles cavort; they dart, dive and swirl through the air at
dizzying heights. Suddenly one of them turns on its back and they
grasp talons spinning into a daring, cart wheeling free fall toward
earth. They unlock talons and flap their powerful wings, flying
upward at the last instant before hitting the ground. This, their
courtship ritual, will bond the two eagles together for life.
Today, bald eagles are seen around the Great Lakes more and more often since DDT and like pesticides were banned.”
As quoted from The Dynamic Great Lakes
Read about this environmental victory in The Dynamic Great Lakes.
The Return of Snowy Owl
February 11, 2012
- Snowy Owl
There have been a lot of snowy owl sightings this year in Michigan. I took this photo. It flew right in front of my windshield as I was driving. I thought it would be gone when I returned but there it was sitting on top of a pole. It looked like part of the pole and I would have missed it if I hadn’t looked for it. It was hiding in plain sight. It’s a thrill to encounter these beautiful owls.
The Pictured Rocks: Lake Superior
February 7, 2012
I wanted to see peregrine falcons. I heard they were nesting on top of the Pictured Rocks. So I took the tourist boat that cruises by the Pictured Rocks and was rewarded with the rare sight of a falcon. This is a good spot for this swift bird because they like to dive on their prey. The disadvantage is that preditors can raid their nests at this location.
Peregrines do well on tall buildings and the stacks of municipal power plants where they can’t be reached by wolves, foxes, bobcats and other predators.
Years ago, before DDT was banned, these beautiful falcons were nearly wiped out. They were sensitive and the poison. The banning of DDT was an environmental victory.
Read more about this in The Dynamic Great Lakes.
Available at bn.com, Amazon and Amazon’s Kindle reader and many other stores.
The Pictured Rocks: Lake Superior
Review of the Dynamic Great Lakes
February 2, 2012
The Dynamic Great Lakes
Review of The Dynamic Great Lakes
U.S. Water News – Peter Wild
Are dinosaurs cruising the benthic depths of the Great Lakes even while we go about our daily tasks? Not exactly. Yet sturgeon, fish weighing up to 300 pounds and similarly plated with armor,are nosing around down there. Occasionally you can see the monsters appear, making their spawning runs up rivers and surfacing like submarines in the pools beneath waterfalls.
The five Great Lakes, holding nearly twenty percent of the earth’s fresh water, are quite young. Gouged out by glaciers, they assumed their present shapes a mere 3,000 years ago. For that, they are a dynamic shifting system, still changing and exhibiting surprising differences. Lake Ontario, for example, the easternmost, although smallest of the bodies, holds more water than Lake Erie, its shallower nearby sister. Here’s a handy primer for all such things, from the interaction of phytoplankton and calcium carbonate that gives a white cast to these inland oceans come August and helps clean the water to the charming ice volcanoes spouting chilly “lava” in the winter.
This is intriguing stuff for adults, but the straightforward presentation also lends itself to use in schools, beginning about the sixth grade and up. And yes, we get the latest news on the zebra mussel, the tube nose goby, and other threats to the natural scheme of things. Also good news; how since the banning of DDT in the 1970′s, the bald eagles have come back.
