Toxic Cocktail

Occupy Cocktail?

2011-11-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

A lot of people have been wondering, why the studied silence from Toxic Cocktail, with all this Occupy Wall Street stuff going on around the world? Is it a massive media conspiracy? Well, no, it's not that. It's just that after much thought, I can't deny that the official beverage of Occupy is beer. It's the drink of the people. It's the drink that can double as a meal. And it's the drink that doesn't totally screw up your commitment to peaceful protest.

Three Eyed Fish

2011-10-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

Three eyed fish, for real, here.

Trojan Factoids

2011-07-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

Some interesting information about the decommissioned Trojan nuclear plant, from today's Oregonian:

-359 metric tons of spent fuel are currently being stored at Trojan

-it was supposed to be removed by 2018, but the current date is 2033

-Portland General Electric is setting aside $12.6 million for decommissioning costs

-PGE spends about $3.3 million a year on storage costs

-the plant closed in 1993

One less LNG proposal in the US

2011-06-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hess LNG is pulling out of its project in Fall River, Mass. The market just isn't there for imported natural gas, they said. This one never really had a chance. It was a logistical nightmare and was opposed by powerful people like John Kerry and Barney Frank. It scared a lot of people, and now that it's officially off the table, I want to thank it for strengthening the anti-LNG movement.

Bridge Cam

2011-06-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

Construction on a new, transit-only bridge over the Willamette begins on July 1. Here is a live view of the east side of the river, where the bridge will be going up: Bridge

Because Coal Cares (tm)

2011-05-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Can this possibly be a real campaign???

http://www.coalcares.org/index.html

free inhalers for children, from Patriot Coal.

Chernobyl, land of giant possibly mutant wild boars

2011-04-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

Just came across this awesome article about Chernobyl from Outside Magazine:

"Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden."

Port Dolphin LNG

2011-04-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

There's an LNG project in Florida that I hadn't heard of before. It's called Port Dolphin LNG.I was alerted to its existence by a notice in the Sutherland LNG email newsletter announcing that Port Dolphin had filed an incidental take application with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Incidental take" is what happens when you are building something or extracting and your activity might accidentally harm or kill an animal that is protected by the government. In this case, the animals in question are - yes, really - dolphins.

Keeping Springfield Safe

2011-03-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

As trace amounts of radioactive material from failed Japanese nuclear reactors are being found around the world, the authorities are assuring us that there is no health hazard. But just to be extra, extra safe, some broadcasters in Canada and Europe are refraining from showing any episodes of "The Simpsons" that depict nuclear emergencies. Because the more you think about a nuclear meltdown, the more likely it is to happen? Because humor is bad way to deal with stressful situations? Because viewers sometimes confuse "The Simpsons" with a documentary? Because people might become alarmed and start thinking that nuclear power isn't safe?

Time for a new obsession?

2011-03-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

Photo: Abandoned condos with a view of Jordan Cove, in Coos Bay, Oregon

A lot has changed since I started following the development of natural gas import terminals two years ago. Nationally, most of the proposals have died, and new reserves of domestic natural gas are being tapped, creating a whole new world of health and environmental nightmares.

Of the three projects that were proposed for Oregon, one is dead, one is hanging by a thread, and one is still more or less proceeding through the regulatory process. The big news this month is that Northwest Natural has withdrawn its application for approval of the Palomar Pipeline. This major pipeline was originally tied to the Bradwood Landing import facility, which went bankrupt last year. There was speculation that Palomar could hook up with Oregon LNG, the second import facility in the Astoria area. That didn’t happen, though, which does leave Oregon LNG in a bit of a pickle. It’s own pipeline only would go only partway across the state, rather than all the way to the north-south transmission network that connects Oregon to California.

Anyway, at this point Oregon LNG can’t even get its pipeline through Clatsop County, the first of five counties the pipe would have to cross after leaving the coastal import station. After a changing of the guard in recent elections, the county board revoked the pipeline’s permit. Of course, the whole thing is tied up in court, and Oregon LNG’s promises to work with the community have dried up into a rancorous tangle of litigation.

That leaves the third project, Jordan Cove LNG, which is also muddling its way through a series of legal hurdles, including the objection of the state of Oregon to federal approval of the project. It is also having trouble with its pipeline — turns out that obtaining the right of eminent domain over the property of 675 landowners, many of them unwilling, creates a bit of a headache. The thing is years behind schedule. Really its only hope is that it takes so long to get approval that the U.S. actually uses up its domestic natural gas in the meantime — we’re estimated to have only enough for next 100 years or so.

Springwater Six: Lonesome Town

2011-03-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry to say that the sixth leg of the Springwater Corridor trek was the worst. I set off from the trail’s intersection with Southeast 82nd Avenue on a bitterly cold day. The wind was blowing off 82nd like it was Lake Michigan. The first thing I saw was a city truck driving down the path. The truck stopped and the young man inside warned me that there was some wet paint on the trail.

I noticed some patches of black paint on the pavement and realized he’d been cruising down the path, painting over graffiti.

On either side of the trail were scraggly bushes, and occasionally the backs of buildings.

At one point there was a rickety home-made bench under a tree that was dedicated to someone in rough paint. Behind it was a falling-down shed. Two people were leaving the shed, saying goodbye to someone inside. I wanted to take a picture of the bench but I didn’t because I was afraid the people were cooking meth in the shed.

There was ice on the puddles and the sky was the color of a dead whale. The wind kept blowing. There was garbage in the tall dry grass.

Jackie was nervous. She was especially unhappy when we walked under the overpass for I-205, six or eight lanes of traffic going overhead at 70 miles an hour. During most of the walk, she stayed out ahead of me, weaving back and forth across the path like she was sniffing for land mines.

On the way back to the car, I walked by a culvert that ran under a busy street. I saw a man ducking into the tunnel, I assume to do drugs.

Couldn’t wait to get back to the car.

That was in January. Now it’s March, I need to buck up and get back out there.

Meltdown

2011-03-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over ideas for a drink in honor of the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, but I don't think I can do better than the cocktail I was served at a place called Vintage last night. First the bartender mixed Maker's Mark and Cynar (the Italian artichoke liqueur) with ice in a pint glass. Then she went into the back room for some reason. Then she poured green Chartreuse into a wine glass and set it on fire. She strained the first mixture into the wine glass to douse the flames, then singed a bit of orange peel and tossed it in.

The government claimed it was not strong enough to cause any harm, but I beg to differ.

Oregon wolves

2011-02-01T22:28:00.000-08:00

Sharp video of Oregon wolves from ODFW via Natural Oregon:

wild wolves

Springwater Trail, Part Five

2011-02-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

I parked across the street from the Wichita Feed & Hardware in the pouring rain.

The trail runs parallel to Southeast Johnson Creek Boulevard. It’s dark and cold and there are no bicyclists and no pedestrians except a man so drunk that he’s stumbling and weaving. He’s got mud on his pants, like he fell down somewhere, and he’s carrying a plastic bag of groceries.

The trail crosses the road at Southeast Bell Avenue, where there’s a convenience store called Bell Station. It looks really old, and I’m guessing the name comes because it was a stop on the old passenger train line that ran where the trail is now.

The online references to the Bell Station Market are a little spotty. Wikipedia calls it “historic.” Yelp says, “they should be ashamed of selling drug paraphernalia in our neighborhood.” It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, where its Period of Significance is described as 1900 to 1924 and its Current Function is “commerce/ trade, domestic, work in progress.”

The trail stretched on along, lined with scrubby areas and industrial storage places. There was a housing development behind a wall. Jackie started acting skittish and pretty soon we came to a no-kill dog shelter, in which a dog was howling.

Then all of sudden we were at the intersection with 82nd Avenue.

Wow, I can’t believe I walked all the way to 82nd Avenue. And still only at Milepost Eight.

Springwater 4: Déja Vu

2011-01-17T21:22:00.000-08:00

At times, walking the Springwater Trail reminds me of taking a subway. You’re cruising along, and then every once in a while, you pop up somewhere familiar and think, whoa, how did I get here?

I ended the third segment of the trip at a place called the Tideman Johnson Natural Area, which I had never heard of before. When I was ready to head out again, I looked it up online to find out where I should park, and realized the area is near where I used to walk when I first moved to Portland.

On a hot September day in 1987, I walked farther than I had ever walked before in Portland. I came to a dusty trial and some railroad tracks. I walked by two kids — they looked like fifth-graders — smoking cigarettes. I came to a swimming hole surrounded by blackberry bushes. The blackberries were all ripe. People were sitting on a concrete slab and jumping off of it into the water.

Returning to the Tideman Johnson, I recognized it. The railroad tracks are now a new paved trail. The water flows faster and the blackberries are replaced by young-looking native plants. The banks of Johnson Creek have been restored in many areas, and I just read in the newspaper that three dead Coho salmon were found 15 miles upstream this year, the farthest up that anyone can remember.

It was a cold, sunny autumn day. I kept walking and emerged into a developed area. I saw a house and shed, run down and overgrown, that reminded me of “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

Then I came to Wichita Feed & Hardware. I thought, whoa, how did I get here?

Hayden Island

2010-12-29T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Importance of Whale Poop

2010-12-29T11:18:00.001-08:00

A study finds that whale poop plays a major role in the health of the ocean, here.

No, there will not be a cocktail recipe for this one.

Springwater Trail Parts 2 and 3

2010-12-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

You can enter Oaks Bottom from the north or the south. I’ve always avoided the main entrance to the north because I associate it with death. When I was in college, a kid I knew disappeared, and I remember them searching Oaks Bottom for him (they later found his body in the river). Years later, someone else I knew drowned there. But I’ve been walking Jackie along the bluff above Oaks Bottom and down through the southern part for many years as well. There are lots of birds there, including blue herons, osprey, and at certain times of the year, a pair of bald eagles.

For the sake of the project, I finally parked at the main entrance and walked down trail I’d been avoiding. It’s a perfectly nice, lightly wooded area, with a paved trail that links up with the Springwater trail.

I continued south, past the gigantic mausoleum, until I got to Southeast Spokane Street, and then I went back. There’s a mural on the mausoleum wall that faces the marsh, with native birds painted much, much larger than life. I wrote an article about it once, and interviewed the head muralist. Well, it turns out that he is also dead — he died in a snowmobiling accident this spring.

A few days later I parked near Spokane and took the next segment of the trail, including the part that hasn’t been built yet. You walk on surface streets for about half a mile, heading west away from the Willamette, until you get back to the trail. As you can see in the photo, it’s not quite as fancy as the main entrance from Day One.

We walked through Sellwood and crossed three bridges: one over Johnson Creek, one over the highway, and one over some railroad tracks. If you were leading a group hike, you could work in a little commentary on the history of transportation here.

From here on out, Johnson Creek will be a regular presence. It’s the one remaining of a huge number of creeks that used to run through the city of Portland (or where the city was to be.) For some reason Johnson Creek was never paved over — one of those examples where neglect is beneficial for the environment in the long term. Johnson Creek runs through some of the sketchier parts of Portland. Along with its obscene name, the creek brings to mind trailer homes, abandoned cars, dumped tires, and blackberry brambles.

The Springwater Trail, Phase 1

2010-11-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

The goal: hike the Springwater Trail.

That’s right, 21 miles of un-punishing trails and non-rugged terrain in a climate where temperatures can gradually plunge to below 50 degrees. Each non-grueling stage of the journey will last from two to five unexcruciating miles.

One thing about old railroad beds — they’ve been graded to a perfect flatness. Work on the Springwater Trail in 1996 and it is mostly, but not entirely, completed. It begins where the Eastbank Esplanade ends and continues east all the way to Boring, following a route that was the route of a passenger train from 1903 to 1958.

During the first stage of the expedition, I discovered that the bike- and foot-path closest to my house, and which I’d never been on before, is really cool. You pass by wooded areas, great views of the river, weird industrial scenes, and picturesque homeless camps. Since I don’t have someone dropping me off and picking me up, I actually have to hike the whole trail twice over. On the first day, I got to Milepost 2.5 and then returned.

An osprey's nest

2010-11-14T17:32:00.001-08:00

as seen from the Springwater Trail

A side channel of the Willamette River

2010-11-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

as seen from the Springwater Trail

Down with Dudley

2010-10-18T22:11:00.001-07:00

Republican candidate for Oregon governor Chris Dudley is an one-man environmental disaster. His biggest donor, in fact, is a timber company. And his economic policies are likely to cause serious problems for the enforcement of basic environmental rules. When the Oregonian did a piece on the two candidates’ views on the environment, Dudley blew off the reporter. Oh, yeh, and he’s not convinced that global warming is caused by humans. I couldn’t bring myself to make a cocktail for him, so instead, I made one in honor of his opponent, Oregon’s dashing former governor, John Kitzhaber (endorsed by the Sierra Club. The candidate, I mean, not the drink.)

Kitz cocktail:

1 shot bourbon

1 teaspoon maple syrup

splash of pepper vodka

Combine ingredients in a shaker without ice and stir. Add ice and shake. Strain into your most attractive cocktail glass. This is a close race, but the more you drink, the more votes Kitzhaber will get.

Drink your beer from a bottle

2010-10-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

Aluminum production is not cool, especially when something goes wrong, as it just did in Hungary.

Gas Pipeline Safety

2010-09-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a New York Times article on gas transmission pipelines. Scary- don't read right before bedtime:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/us/25pipeline.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&exprod=myyahoo&adxnnlx=1285527688-5ztsmwDFz5/wi4ToEBfejQ

Fish kill

2010-09-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a creepy photo from Louisiana:

http://jalopnik.com/5638836/this-is-not-a-road

Oregon Public Broadcasting's new blog

2010-09-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

OPB has a new environmental blog: Ecotrope

I really wanted that job! Oh well.

(Naturally) Radioactive Foods

2010-08-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Eater.com, for this reassuring tidbit:

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/08/radioactive_foods.php

Road Trip: Washington D.C.

2010-08-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

Look, it's the National Pond Scum

Hanford: Now even more contaminated!

2010-08-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

For years, the Hanford site on the Columbia River has been known as the most contaminated nuclear site in North America.

Now the New York Times reports that “the amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported.”

That doesn’t mean that the site is three times as contaminated as previously thought — sigh of relief — since plutonium is just one of the deadly, poorly contained toxins at the site. But with a half-life of 24,000 years, it’s a concern. Cleaning it up will be a complex process, “perhaps requiring technologies that do not yet exist,” the Times reports whimsically.

Cocktail Photomicrography

2010-07-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

A lab at Florida State University has been taking photos of cocktails at the microscopic level. In addition to the colorful, crystalline formations, they've included useful recipes and fun facts. The Long Island Iced Tea, for instance, "usually gets us commode-hugging drunk." Sounds like a good party school. See images here:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/cocktails/index.html

You can even buy them as posters!

Cocktail Recipe: The BP

2010-07-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

After several failed attempts, I have concocted a drink in honor of the Gulf oil well disaster. This is not a celebratory cocktail, although the flow has currently been stopped. But with massive amounts of oil and dispersants still swirling around out there, this is the kind of drink that you drink because things are really, really bad.

It’s strong and sweet. The egg whites give it a frothy texture, and a faintly off odor. And it leaves a scum behind.

The BP

1 shot gold rum

½ shot Kahlua

White of an egg, or 2 tablespoons pasteurized egg whites

Combine with ice in a shaker. Shake thoroughly, strain, top with unsweetened cocoa powder.

Palomar Pipeline Delayed Indefinitely

2010-07-06T20:09:00.000-07:00

When the Bradwood Landing LNG project was cancelled, the folks behind the Palomar Pipeline, which would have linked Bradwood to the existing natural gas pipeline system, claimed to be moving forward. All along, they had insisted that the pipeline and the LNG terminal were two separate projects. But now they are citing Bradwood's bankruptcy as a major reason for putting Palomar on what I am guessing will be a permanent hiatus.

The Palomar Pipeline was an environmental nightmare. Here's hoping competitor Oregon LNG's pipeline follows it into Oregon's fascinating mausoleum of terrible ideas that never saw the light of day.

Photo: Mount Hood, where a new natural gas pipeline will NOT be cutting a swath of destruction.

Reindeer's Tears

2010-07-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

The other day I was sitting in a bar with some friends, drinking a vodka and cranberry. One of my friends said, "Oh, you got a reindeer's tears."

No one else had ever heard the drink called that before. She used to live in Alaska- I think that's where she got it.

Looking it up online, I found several variations on the recipe, but none was just a vodka-cran. In fact, a reliable-looking account said the whole thing was a Finnish joke: you pour a shot of vodka, put in a single cranberry, then drink the vodka. The cranberry adds nothing.

At any rate, it always seemed to me that vodka and cranberry should have a name. And I'm sure there are plenty of sad reindeer out there, what with the global warming and all.

Photo: Ironically, it makes a good summer drink.

Sea Lion Season Ends

2010-06-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

When I first went out to Oregon City to look for sea lions, I didn’t know much about the issue. Now I’ve seen the lions at both Willamette Falls and the Bonneville Dam. I’ve done a lot more research and I’ve thought it over carefully.

I now totally oppose the killing of sea lions at Bonneville Dam, and I’m pissed that the authorities are now seeking permission to kill sea lions at Willamette Falls as well.

The spring Chinook salmon season is over, now, and the sea lions have gone off to their coastal mating grounds (except for the 12 that were killed.) The issue won’t come up again until next spring, when more sea lions will be killed. That’s despite the fact that, according to the Oregonian, the killing of sea lions at Bonneville failed to reduce the number of salmon being killed by the sea lions.

In other words, culling doesn’t work. Or in other words, it would only work if they killed ALL the sea lions at the dam.

Forty years ago, that’s what they would have done. Until the late 1960s, there was a bounty on sea lion heads in Oregon. And that’s an important backdrop to this story.

Back then, they thought that removing predators would increase the number of salmon, just as fishermen in Japan slaughter dolphins, thinking that it will increase the number of fish they catch.

We now know that removing top predators from a food chain in bad for the entire ecosystem. But this plan to kill sea lions isn’t intended to protect the ecosystem. It’s intended to protect fishermen — and that in only a short-sighted, short-term way.

The influence of the sport fishing lobby has often been good for the environment, but here I feel they’ve totally lost their heads. There needs to be a long term goal of increasing the numbers of wild salmon, not preserving individual fishery salmon so that they can be caught on lines instead of eaten by sea lions.

Vengeance should have no place in this equation. Neither should a certain bizarre and outdated way of describing these animals as if they were people — bad people.

The Oregon City News, for instance, quotes Oregon House Speaker Dave Hunt (D-Clackamas):

“The sea lions grab the fish right out of the water and take a bite out of them in plain view before they throw them away,” he said. “Fundamentally, they’re bullies.”

Over and over again, the sea lions are portrayed as interlopers, gluttonous, belligerent, obese creatures who don’t play by the rules. Actually they’re just doing what they’ve always done, or at least, what they always did, before we nearly wiped them out, just a few decades ago.

Photo: A flyer posted on the bulletin board at Bonneville Dam

Road Trip: Bend

2010-06-22T22:10:00.001-07:00

Busch is the official beer of litterbugs everywhere. Along country roads and scenic viewpoints and the high water marks of beaches, cans of Busch certainly aren't the only garbage, but look around and you'll see what I mean. That glinting silver in the sagebrush or seaweed or ferns? It's almost always Busch. This photo was taken in the lava rocks at the base of Mount Bachelor near Bend, Oregon.

Drink Review: The Atomic Cocktail

2010-06-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

So I finally got around to making an Atomic Cocktail, and it was disgusting.

The Atomic Cocktail was invented in the 1950s in Las Vegas, when nuclear explosions at the nearby Nevada Proving Ground were being promoted as a tourist attraction. This was a drink specifically designed to toast the mushroom cloud, so it should be the favorite drink of this blog.

Unfortunately, if appropriately, it tastes like rocket fuel. The drink starts out traitorously with vodka, which is mixed with an equal part brandy and a splash of sherry. Shake, strain, top with Champagne. It’s sharp, aggressive, and mean, and you start to feel a buzz almost immediately.

I don’t recommend it, although I do recommend its predecessor, this 1945 song by Slim Gaillard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6492gMX0tAY

(presented here with a weird and excellent montage of atomic memorabilia.)

As Slim says, “Take one sip, you won’t need any more.”

The Oregon LNG project is a dead end

2010-06-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Photo: The Skipanon Peninsula, proposed site of the Oregon LNG terminal, Oct. 2009

I have decided to remove the Oregon LNG liquefied natural gas terminal from my list of looming environmental disasters. It’s still a terrible idea, but I just don’t see any way that it’s really going to happen.

Some of my reasons:

1. The bankruptcy of Bradwood Landing LNG. You might think the loss of its biggest rival would be good news for Oregon LNG, but like Bradwood, Oregon LNG is backed by investment bankers, and they like a good, safe investments. When an almost identical project goes bankrupt, red lights start flashing.

2. In the May election, three non-incumbents were elected to the five-person Clatsop County Board of Commissioners, and all three are opposed to LNG, including one candidate who was a high-profile anti-LNG activist before running.

3. Peter Hansen is an ass. Hansen is the CEO of the project as well as its main spokesperson (which looks kind of sketchy right there), and he’s managed to piss off pretty much everyone. He’s also stopped speaking to the Daily Astorian.

4. Oregon LNG still doesn’t have it’s FERC certificate, and the Bush era of rubber stamping these things is over.

5. Oregon LNG relies on an extremely controversial pipeline that will be causing headaches for years to come. I just don’t think it has the legs to weather both local opposition to the terminal and something like 200 separate eminent domain court battles.

6. The anti-LNG coalition is focused, experienced and emboldened.

For these reasons I have decided to stop obsessing on Astoria politics and instead to dedicate my neurotic energy to the oil spill in the Gulf.

Road Trip: Las Vegas

2010-06-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

Although not as popular as the sexy sailor-and-siren review at the Treasure Island Casino, the Atomic Testing Museum draws a fair number of Las Vegas tourists. We took a cab from the ridiculously opulent entrance of the Venetian, past the gondolas and the campanile and the winged lion, and pretty soon we were on a godforsaken, dusty stretch of Flamingo Road.

In the parking lot of the Atomic Museum, you feel like you’re really in the desert.

The Nevada Proving Ground (now known as the Nevada Test Site) is about 65 miles away, to the northwest. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, documents the various stages of atomic testing in Nevada, first above and then below ground.

During the above-ground tests, which lasted from 1951 until 1963, the mushroom clouds were visible from Vegas, and were actually a tourist attraction.

Las Vegas began billing itself as Atomic City. At the Sky Room in the Desert Inn, tourists drank Atomic Cocktails and took in panoramic views of the desert and the nuclear explosions in the distance.

The Atomic Testing Museum does a good job of merging the pop culture aspects of the atomic age with the science, the military history and the spectacle of the Bomb. A big disappointment is that photography is not allowed — I can’t remember all the stuff in the glass case dedicated to products branded with rockets and explosions. The candy Atomic Fire Balls was one of them.

There’s a recreation of a 1950s living room, with a mannequin family and nuclear safety films playing on the vintage TV. Nearby are slides of all the tests done on mannequins in the desert, with before and after photos.

There are big pieces of equipment, video displays, and interactive bits like a Geiger counter and a set of half-life projections that are compared with how long the planned containment systems will last (example: the former 30,000 years; the latter, 100 years).

The museum is a manageable size and has a great gift shop.

The main event is a 10-minute film in a small theater about the history of the testing site. The film is fairly balanced, although several talking heads claim that America’s nuclear weapons program was necessary because it ended the Cold War. (Really? I thought that was the Cold War.) The overall impact of the film is chilling.

As it ended, there was a strange silence in the room. “Should we clap?” asked my friend.

Among other things, the film touched on the Downwinders, the residents in the path of fallout from the tests whose communities had high cancer rates in the years to follow. Several people from the testing program said that they felt terrible about it, they didn’t know the effects could be so deadly and far-reaching.

But this is Las Vegas. It’s pretty easy to believe that they were deluding themselves all along.

Cocktail Recipe: The Atomic Cocktail

1 ½ ounces vodka

1 ½ ounces brandy

1 teaspoon sherry

1 ½ ounces dry Champagne

Shake first three ingredients with ice and strain into a martini glass. Top with Champagne. (This is the original Las Vegas recipe, I haven’t tried it myself yet.)

Bradwood RIP Update

2010-05-05T22:19:00.000-07:00

NorthernStar Natural Gas, the parent company for the Bradwood Landing project, has filed for bankruptcy. Among its creditors is the Palomar Pipeline project, which is owed $17.2 million according to the AP.

Bradwood Landing RIP

2010-05-04T20:35:00.001-07:00

I am totally stoked to report that NorthernStar Natural Gas has pulled the funding for the Bradwood Landing LNG terminal. After having spent $100 million dollars and almost six years trying to get the project off the ground, the company finally had to admit that it just wasn’t a good investment. In a bitter press release reminiscent of the Lou Rawls song “You’re Gonna Miss My Loving,” the company blamed red tape and the economy for the withdrawal. “In particular,” reads the press release, “the challenging regulatory environment gives investors pause, especially considering that Bradwood Landing would have such a positive impact on the Northwest’s economy and environment.” In other words, look out, Oregon, you’ll be sorry for your evil environmental laws some day! The company also continues to maintain that the building of the terminal has no bearing on the Palomar Pipeline. But I predict that plans for the pipeline will be history soon enough. Bradwood was the first stop on my LNG tour of Oregon last fall. After having visited all three proposed terminal sites, I feel that while the whole project of importing natural gas to Oregon is a dumb idea, Bradwood’s location made it the worst of the three proposals.

Next up: So far I’ve been too depressed about the Gulf oil spill to come up with an appropriate drink recipe, but I’m working on it.

Bradwood Landing LNG Update

2010-04-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

Aside from volcanic eruptions and 100-year floods, most of the major events that shape our environment occur in appeals courts. Pretty much every approval for every aspect of every LNG proposal in Oregon has been appealed, causing years of delays. Sometimes the delays alone are enough to stop a project, especially when they coincide with a radical regime change like the switch from Bush to Obama. That is why it turns out that Clatsop County wasn’t doing Bradwood Landing a favor when they let Bradwood’s application sail through the county approval process in 2008. Now, two years later, an appeals court has returned the decision back to the county for a second time, because, after all this time, no one has successfully defined the terms “small,” “medium,” and “large.” (I blame Starbucks for the confusion.) Laws protecting the Columbia River state that only small to moderate-sized developments can be approved. I mean, obviously a 55-acre development is large — if you’re opposed to it. On the other hand, it could be medium, or even small. Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, for instance, is 2538 acres. The funny thing is, this issue could turn out to be the one that sinks Bradwood Landing for good.

Farmers vs Oregon LNG

2010-04-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Access to information was at the crux of hearings held last week to clarify conflicts between landowners and Oregon LNG and the Oregon Pipeline. The hearings were ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and held over three days in Astoria, Forest Grove and Portland.

I attended the final day, Thursday, at Portland City Hall. Administrative Law Judge Bobbie McCartney was a breath of fresh air, asking sharp questions, putting witnesses at ease, and bringing some humor to the necessary tedium of this kind of thing. She was very understanding of the fact that a lot of the testimony was a little vague. Two and three years ago, when landowners first started hearing that a natural gas pipeline might be passing through their land, they weren’t writing down dates or labeling documents. Their statements were also constrained because their central concern — that a liquefied natural gas company is planning to lay claim to swaths of their property — was outside the scope of the hearings.

The repeated complaint within the scope of the hearings was lack of information. Landowners have had a hard time getting detailed pipeline maps, and frequently were not informed about public hearings. During a tour of the pipeline route conducted by Oregon LNG and FERC, a farmer and her sister followed the tour van around all day in their car because no one would give them the tour’s itinerary. Later when the judge asked this farmer to put an aerial map into evidence she refused to let it go, clutching it like treasure map.

It’s likely that many affected parties didn’t know about the hearing I attended. In a follow-up column written the next day, Joyce Sauber of the Hillsboro Argus writes, “To this date, there are still hundreds of property owners in our Gales Creek Valley and along the two proposed LNG pipeline routes, who do not know there have been hearings, meetings and site tours, or that one of these two proposed LNG pipelines will cross their property.”

After the hearing there was an LNG protest outside City Hall. I milled around, taking photos and trying to gauge the reaction of passers-by. Somehow this protest felt different from protests I’ve attended on other issues. It took me a while to figure it out. It was the informational quality of it — at least in Portland, an LNG protest isn’t about registering opposition, it’s about registering that the issue exists at all.

History/ Drink Recipe: The Angry Sea Lion

2010-04-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

A terrible thing happened in May of 2008.

The Fish & Wildlife service announced that six sea lions at Bonneville Dam had found their way into two open traps and been shot to death by unknown attackers.

The news was widely reported. From the New York Times: “State and federal authorities set up traps to humanely catch and remove them from the dam, to be shipped to zoos and wildlife parks. But over the weekend someone shot and killed six of the sea lions as they lay in the traps.”

Things had been tense on the river for a while. Fishermen were noticing increasing numbers of sea lions at the dam, and the sea lions were aggressive, eating a lot of fish and even stealing salmon right off the fishing lines.

In March, Oregon and Washington had received federal authority to remove the sea lions, lethally or non-lethally. In April, the Humane Society of the United States had negotiated a temporary hold on sea lion killing while the society argued the case in court. Also in April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared a “fishery failure” for the Pacific Coast salmon fishery.

And now four California sea lions, including a pup, and two endangered Steller sea lions were dead.

Clearly, someone had decided to take the law into their own hands.

Or not.

A few days later a correction was released. The sea lions had not been shot to death. They had died of heat stroke after entering the open traps, which had somehow closed behind them while the staff was gone for the weekend.

How accomplished of a forensics expert do you have to be to determine whether or not an animal has been shot to death? Actually, the autopsies found that two or three of the sea lions had been shot, non-lethally, at some previous time. Ultimately, the whole thing was written off as an accident.

The Angry Sea Lion

1 ounce Black Seal rum
¼ ounce hot pepper vodka
orange wedge and orange peel
ginger ale

Pour rum and vodka over ice. Squeeze in the juice from a quarter of an orange and trim a bit of peel over the glass, then add. Top with ginger ale.

Serve on the rocks!

Or replace the ginger ale with Coke and the orange with lime and call it a Sea Lion Libre.

Bonneville Sea Lions

2010-04-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Bonneville sea lions are national news again this year. An Associated Press story from March 8 was picked up in salmon-less places like Dallas, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin. I think people are intrigued by the conundrum of endangered species vs. endangered species, or else they like to get worked up by the killing of sea lions, who are, arguably, the cutest of all predator species.

So far this year, at least eight sea lions have been killed at Bonneville Dam. The idea makes me feel kind of sick, especially after I went up there on Saturday and saw them for myself.

Bonneville Dam is a major source of power for the Northwest, and it’s also a minor tourist attraction, both for the dam itself and for the migrating salmon that you can watch through special underwater windows. For some reason, fish ladders have been deemed an edifying pastime for very young children. I was taken to several as a small child, and found them a real snooze. This weekend, my friend and I were surrounded by families with unimpressed little kids.

Watching the occasional Chinook struggle past the mossy window is a lot more interesting if you care about stuff like politics and sushi.

The kids would probably rather be watching the sea lions, but that is not encouraged. There is an informational plaque inside the visitor center, from which I learned that sea lions have always swum up the river to hunt, since long before there were dams. Somehow I had gotten the impression that this was a new thing — (“They learn,” said an Army Corps of Engineers biologist in the AP article.)

The visitor center is on an island. To the north is the main dam, all roaring water and billows of mist. To the south is a smaller dam, the locks, and a main entrance to the fish ladders. We walked a little ways down a mossy road on this side of the island, where the water is much calmer.

There we saw a little black head in the water, then two and three. Sometimes they would dive with a splash of their tail flippers. Sometimes they would just kind of splash around. They were too far away to get a good photo, or to tell if any of them caught a fish. Overall, there were between eight and ten in this area.

I couldn’t tell if they were Steller or California sea lions, although some of them were enormous. The smaller Stellers are endangered and only the California sea lions are being killed. The historic range of these sea lions is from Mexico to B.C., so I’m afraid the name California brands them unfairly as invaders.

After I came home from Bonneville, I read up a lot more on the sea lion issue, and found two things online that I want to mention.

First, there is an activist network dedicated to the Bonneville sea lions. The Portland branch of In Defense of Animals (famous for their foie gras and fur protests) is involved, and there is a Sea Lion Defense Brigade ( http://sealiondefensebrigade.org/) that has been monitoring the sea lions 24 hours a day from an RV on the Washington side of the river. They had a party this weekend and Tre Arrow provided musical entertainment… so somehow I feel like we’ll be hearing more from these folks in the future.

Second, in trying to find out who all was involved in the initial request to allow killing the sea lions, I came across the website of the Oregon Anglers (http://www.oregon-anglers.org/).

They sound like a reasonable bunch, at first: “Oregon Anglers was formed to find ways to meet the needs of both the state’s diverse wildlife, and the practical and economic needs of the communities that depend on the fishers and hunters.”

But scroll down to the part about sea lions, and they completely lose their cool:

“Since 1999 the California sea lions at Bonneville have had their way with spring salmon and steelhead runs. Now in 2009 they have arrived in even greater numbers.”

Then, in large, bold, underlined letters:

“Now we can begin to even the score!”

Had their way? Even the score? Sorry, Oregon Anglers, you just lost my sympathy.

One final note: Full Sail’s brewpub in Hood River has a nice view and great beer but it feels kind of corporate and the food is pretty expensive.

In like a lion?

2010-04-07T23:46:00.001-07:00

I headed up to Oregon City yesterday to look for sea lions.

What’s that, you say? Sea lions live in the sea? That’s how they got their name?

I know, but every spring, sea lions follow the Chinook salmon runs upriver. For years, there’s been all kinds scandals surrounding the issue of sea lions at Bonneville Dam. The dam creates a sort of vertical bottleneck that makes the salmon much easier to get ahold of than they are in the open ocean, and the sea lions are eating them by the hundreds.

To protect the salmon, the Fish & Wildlife Service has tried scaring them away with fireworks and underwater noise bombs. They’ve sent some offending sea lions off to join the marine mammal circus (Sea World), and they’ve killed others.

Like Bonneville Dam, the locks and fish ladder at Oregon City create a barrier that causes migrating salmon to pile up in the Willamette River south of Portland. The Oregon City News ran a pretty thorough piece on the issue last week (http://www.oregoncitynewsonline.com/news/story.php?story_id=126997866815858600).

These sea lion are often portrayed in the news humorously, with reporters using words like “buffet” and “feast” to describe the salmon that sea lions “chomp” and “munch” and “gobble.” One Seattle Times headline reads “Snacking sea lions scarfing up sparse Columbia Chinook run.”

I question whether the jokey tone is appropriate, since this is an issue that drives people apoplectic with rage. Some people are foaming at the mouth that more isn’t being done to stop the sea lions from damaging the fish run. Others are flipping their wigs that the Fish & Wildlife Service is killing innocent mammals. At one point, killing of lions at Bonneville was halted by the Humane Society.

There aren’t currently any plans to kill the sea lions at Willamette Falls, but Fish &

Wildlife is planning to start trying to scare them away. I was hoping I might be able to see or hear them in action, but it didn’t work out that way.

Willamette Falls is one of the biggest waterfalls in American, not in height but in width. In fact, its broad horseshoe shape makes it the seventeenth widest waterfall in the world, according to the World Waterfall Database (http://www.world-waterfalls.com/home.php).

These falls really are an awesome sight. There was a time when men came to this remarkable natural wonder and rubbed their eyes in amazement, unable to believe that there could be such a perfect place to build a paper mill. And so, part of what makes Willamette Falls such an awesome sight today is the rusty, rickety labyrinth of buildings, tanks, steaming chimneys and rushing torrents of wastewater that overlay the natural geography. It’s really impossible to tell where the paper mills end and the falls begin.

A scenic path runs along the east rim of the river gorge, providing epic views — most of it is closed right now, though. I took the second photo on this post from that path last summer. There’s also a bit of scenic pathway running right along the river, attached to the upper path by a scary metal staircase. But all this is on the wrong side of the river to see the locks or the fish ladder.

I poked around on the west side of the river a little, but I didn’t find a good way to get near the water.

My best view was from a turnout along Highway 99 (across the street from a very nice bar called the Highland Still House, FYI). There were at least two other people there looking for sea lions, and a few others that were probably tourists.

It was windy and raining.

A bit further south is another, smaller viewpoint. From there, I saw a sleek little black head in the water. It was near the small blue building in the first photo.

The sea lion was swimming against the current, and quickly went underwater. I saw it a few more times, or else some other sea lions, in the rough grey water below the mills. I started thinking about how long it takes to drive from Portland to Astoria. This sea lion swam farther than that — over 100 miles, against a strong current — to get here.

I’m not going to try to resolve the sea lion issue, but I do think they deserve a little more respect, if not from Fish & Wildlife, then at least from the people who write about them. There’s a hint, in many accounts, that the sea lions are somehow not playing fair. And no one’s talking about what happens out in the ocean, where pollock fishing is killing tens of thousands of salmon every year (http://www.yukonsalmon.com/whatwedo/Fact%20Sheet%20Salmon%20Bycatch%208-08.pdf).

Toxic River Update

2010-04-03T14:46:00.001-07:00

Could both the mayor and the state department of environmental quality be reading my blog? Or is it just a total coincidence that emails from both Sam Adams and the DEQ arrived in my inbox yesterday having to do with the issue of pollution in Portland rivers?

Well, it’s just a total coincidence. There’s no way the city of Portland could have developed a master plan for cleaning up and developing the North Willamette Reach in just this past week. Adams announced the plan in a “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” editorial in the Oregonian, which he also sent to everyone on his mailing list. The plan identifies key “pearl” sites in which to focus environmental restoration. This kind of gives me the creeps. I mean, pearls are usually pretty small, right?

Meanwhile, the DEQ is revising its water quality standards based on a new fish consumption rate and separately is releasing a report on persistent toxins in Oregon waterways. One hundred and eighteen different toxins are identified in the report. This also give me the creeps, obviously.

Toxic fish

2010-03-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

I asked this girl to hold up this fish so I could take a picture. I’m feeling pretty guilty now that I didn’t tell her to get the hell away from it instead. This fish is contaminated with industrial waste that causes cancer and learning defects, and on top of that, it’s been swimming in raw sewage.

A walk on the beach at Swan Island

2010-03-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, a regular procession of pickup trucks backs down the Swan Island boat ramp, past the raw sewage warning signs, to deposit small boats into the water. The ramp slants down into one corner of the Swan Island Basin, the body of water that separates Swan Island (really, a peninsula) from the mainland.

I’m here because the area is part of the Portland Harbor Superfund site. Everyone else is here to fish.

Most of the boaters have fishing gear with them, and a few people are fishing from narrow strips of sandy beach to the north and south of the ramp, as well. They are less than half a city block away from signs reading “Fish from these waters may be poisonous to eat,” and “Warning! Sewage Spill. Avoid water contact.” (Keep in mind, the sewage warning is seasonal, but the fish warning is year-round, and relates to the decades-long buildup of industrial toxins in the river, a totally different issue from the human waste problem.)

The whole place has a nasty, lingering stench that clashes strangely with the sparkling sun and the gently lapping water.

I’m intrigued by a small boat that’s floating near the beach — it looks like the aquatic version of a homeless person’s shopping cart. It’s fortified with plywood and covered with tarps. A small lopsided raft tied to its side is piled with junk: recycling bins, bottles, scrap wood.

Beyond that is a broken down dock and about the foulest-looking drainpipe you could ever hope to see.

The main sewage outlet, though, appears to be on the other side of the boat ramp, about three yards from where an old man is fishing. His grandchildren are playing nearby.

Heading north, I pass them and continue up the beach until I reach a toxic roadblock. Something opalescent and bright orange is oozing out of the sand here and draining into the water.

Out in the channel a ridiculously small tugboat is parked in the middle of a floating island of scrap wood. Its captain is aboard, poking around as if for something worth towing. His black lab watches him.

On my way back, Grandpa offers me a seat on his blue plastic bucket. I can see he’s fishing with worms, and using a sort of homemade looking getup. I ask him what he’s catching. He doesn’t speak English; gestures to his granddaughter, who is pouring water from the channel into a big black plastic tub. The tub turns out to have live fish in it, four big ones. They have small whiskers, so I take them to be catfish. I ask her to hold one up for me, so I can take a picture.

I ask her if she’s going to eat them. She laughs and shrugs, as if she’s embarrassed.

Swan Island warnings

2010-03-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

The Swan Island boat ramp is covered in warning signs, and it's right next to a big drainpipe. Down the way is the day-glo part of the beach. The Navy, Freightliner and UPS are all nearby, but I couldn't find a bar.

The Dockside Tavern

2010-02-17T14:37:00.000-08:00

Nothing reminds you that you’re just a speck in the eye of Industry like getting stuck at a train crossing.

Freight trains cross Naito Parkway in the northern part of downtown Portland, near the river. Once you (eventually) cross those tracks, you’re in the Northwest Industrial district.

I’m headed for the Dockside Tavern, a crooked box of a building that looks like it was built out of driftwood, a long time ago. It used to face an industrialized stretch of the river; now it faces a long line of condos. I’ve always been intrigued by the place, but my goal today is to investigate it as the place in Portland where you can get a drink in closest proximity to the Portland Harbor Superfund site. I’d actually already had a few beers at the Dockside a few nights before, but I wanted to come back during the day so I could walk around and look at the river.

It’s Sunday and the new Riverscape Street, a sort of frontage road for the condo project, is lined with Mercedes-Benzes, which I assume belong to real estate agents.

On the other side of the condos, a wide esplanade has been constructed along the river. It runs about a quarter of a mile from the base of the Fremont Bridge north along the line of townhouse-style Riverscape Condos towards their crown jewel, the luxury Pacifica Tower. The whole development is partially built and partially occupied. At the north end, where the path peters out, someone has put in a little herb garden marked off with river rocks and raw construction boards.

The selling point here is simple: river view.

It’s a wide sweep of water, with a panorama of Industry on the other side: trains, smokestacks, crumbling docks and giant silos holding who-knows-what, far enough away to look kind of romantic. The water is green and blue, reflecting the sky. It doesn’t look toxic.

Oh, but it is. It’s contaminated with enough heavy metals, PCBs, dioxin and pesticides to qualify it for the Superfund list, designating it one of the most polluted spots in America. (There are about 1200 sites on the list.) The Superfund was envisioned as a way to clean up abandoned deposits of hazardous waste; the petroleum and chemical industries were taxed to create revenue for the program. Those taxes are no longer being collected, and the fund is no longer so super. That must be why my most recent water bill includes a $4.06 charge for the Portland Harbor Superfund.

Actually, it was that water bill that inspired me to seek out the Dockside. I envisioned it as the haunt of rugged Scandinavian longshoremen in watchcaps who would occasionally break out the grappling hooks if someone cheated at shuffleboard. Inside, it looks pretty much like any neighborhood bar, or rather, a little nicer, if a little more lost in time. The hanging lamps are the kind of stained glass things that used to be popular in the 1970s. There are beer signs and TVs and a menu that looks the way all menus used to look when I was a kid: multiple different kinds of burgers, clam chowder, fries, grilled cheese.

On the back of the menu is a history of the place, which has been a bar or restaurant since the 1920s. Before it was the Dockside, it was called What’s Up Doc. Before that it was called Dottie’s Sternwheeler. It became nationally notorious during the Tonya Harding scandal after incriminating evidence was found in the bar’s outside garbage receptacle.

It’s a nice enough place to have a beer, although it closes quite early. I went for happy hour with a friend one night, and then decided to return to the scene of the crime in the afternoon, when I could walk around with my dog and look at the water.

Just south of the bridge, I saw a man fishing. I wanted to know what kind of fish he was catching, and whether he would eat it. (State guidelines indicate that it’s OK to eat resident fish from this part of the river, occasionally, in small amounts, as long as you’re not pregnant, nursing, under the age of 6, or have a compromised immune system.)

When he saw my dog, he said, “That’s a nice dog.”

I said, “Thanks. Catch anything?”

“What kind of dog is that?” he asked. We talked about the dog some more. Then I said, again, “Catch anything?”

“Well, OK, then,” he said. “Have a nice day.”

Riverscape Condos

2010-02-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

I don’t like condos, but at least I have to admit that condo developers aren’t the ones who have spent the last 150 years dumping sewage and toxic chemicals into the Willamette River. And unlike industrial users, condo builders like to make nice esplanades along the waterfront so that people like me can poke around and take photos.

Pacifica Tower

2010-02-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

This could be your view from the balcony of a luxury condo in the Pacifica Tower. The water here is so contaminated by industrial pollution that it was declared a Superfund site in 2000, meaning it is on the EPA’s National Priorities List of contaminated sites.

The Cleveland Disaster of 1944

2010-01-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

LNG technology isn’t new, but it was new in 1944, when the only serious LNG-related disaster to strike the United States occurred.

It was a Friday afternoon, October 20, when one of the four storage tanks at the East Ohio Gas Company, on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, began to leak. Facing increasing demand, companies had just begun condensing natural gas by cooling it, so that more could be stored in less space. The Cleveland plant was one of the first LNG storage facilities in America, and the tank hadn’t been built strongly enough.

At 2:30 p.m., the liquid began to seep from the tank. It returned to a partially gaseous state, appearing as a white fog. The winds from Lake Eerie blew the gas vapor into the surrounding neighborhood. Some of the vapor hung low in the air, travelling along gutters, sinking into storm drains and collecting underground in the sewer system.

Then, something ignited the gas. Manhole covers were blown sky-high. Jets of fire shot up from under the street.

There wasn’t a single explosion, but many. The leaking tank exploded in the initial blast, around 2:40 p.m., and a second tank at the facility blew up around 3 p.m. Fireballs from the exploding tanks could be seen for miles around.

People who had left their houses during the initial explosion returned home, only to be incinerated as a series of new explosions occurred, with ignited gas coming up through the drainpipes and engulfing homes in flames within seconds.

Images of the scene show fire and smoke shooting high into the sky, and afterwards, workers sifting through the rubble, looking for bodies. Piles of loose bricks filled the streets, and trees were reduced to burnt stumps. A square mile of the city was destroyed, including 70 homes, two factories, and the underground infrastructure.

About 130 people were killed, including 61 who remained unidentified at the time they were buried. Approximately 225 people were injured. Husbands and children returning home from school and work found their homes completely blown away, mom and all.

The Cleveland Memory website has an amazing archive of photos from the disaster here:

http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=subjec&CISOROOT=all&CISOBOX1=East+Ohio+Gas+Co.+Explosion+And+Fire&CISOSTART=1,1

Could this happen today? Not exactly the way it did then, no. Storage tanks are much stronger, and all kinds of additional precautions are taken.

However, LNG itself is as dangerous now as it was then. If it does happen to escape, there’s no containing it and no way to predict how it will mix with surrounding air, wind, and worst of all, sparks. One commentator notes that the spill that caused this disaster was about five percent of the volume of gas held by a modern LNG tanker.

Nukem?

2009-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a tidbit from World Nuclear News: Russia's AtomStroyExport (ASE) has completed its purchase of the Nukem Technologies subsidiary of Germany's Nukem. The two companies signed a contract in August regarding the sale of the business, which specialises in decommissioning, waste management and engineering services.

There was no mention of any plans to change the name of the company. Apparently no one's figured out yet that it might seem inappropriate in some English-speaking countries for a company whose business is nuclear safety to be called Nuke 'Em!

Clifton Update

2009-12-24T20:55:00.001-08:00

While looking for Bradwood Landing, I came across signs of the dead town of Clifton. Yesterday, I happened across more information about the town on an old 1993 episode of "Oregon Field Guide." Apparently it was a small fishing settlement, one of many that used to dot both sides of the Columbia River. Immigrants from a variety of countries used to fish this stretch of river in sailboats called "butterfly boats" because of the shape of their sails. A passenger train from Portland stopped at Clifton twice a day. Nothing is left but an abandoned general store, some railroad tracks, and some pilings, which used to support houses. There was also a dance hall and a tavern. Apparently the residents of Clifton were of Mediterranean background, because they used to order up a rail car or two of grapes every year and make their own wine.

Delicious, refreshing uranium

2009-12-08T22:18:00.000-08:00

Today the New York Times reported on the alarming number of Safe Drinking Water Act violations that have occurred in the past five years, including “illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.”

If the Bush administration goes down in the kind of infamy it deserves, it won’t be for being too conservative — it will be for being criminally lazy.

Anyway, the mention of uranium reminds me that it’s high time to tell the story of the glowing green cocktail glasses at the top of this blog. Actually, they were probably meant to be berry dishes, and sold as part of a genteel set of glassware of a style known as Depression glass, or vaseline glass, or uranium glass. The distinctive feature of this type of glass is its green color, which was achieved by glassmakers in the 1880s through 1960s by adding uranium to the glass. In regular light, it’s a pretty, clear, pale green that looks just right in grandma’s kitchen. But under black light, it glows like the Chevy Malibu at the end of “Repo Man.”

According to my extensive Wikipedia research, it’s safe to drink out of, but it’s not recommended that you drink liquids that have been stored in it. It will set off a Geiger counter.

If you happen to be in Japan, you can check out the Fairywood Glass Museum, http://kanko.town.kagamino.lg.jp/fairywood%20english%20ver/ dedicated to uranium glass “with mysterious shine,” which they manufacture in an adjoining studio. You can also find uranium glass in pretty much every antique mall in America.

How to Make Blue Curacao, Part One

2009-11-29T11:20:00.000-08:00

When you’re basing cocktails recipes on famous environmental disasters, it often seems appropriate to make a Blue Drink. The blue itself is so unnatural, and there’s a whole string of associations there, too. The most famous Blue Drink is the Blue Hawaiian, which makes me think of Elvis, then Vegas, then the Nevada Test Site. Also, Hawaii, the U. S. military in the South Pacific, then Bikini Atoll, where we’re still doing damage control (although I read that the Spam and Coke are now causing a lot more health problems than the radioactivity.)

Anyway, the DeKuyper brand blue curacao that I have tastes really gross. I thought I could do better.

My first idea was that curacao was just an orange-flavored liqueur, so I’d buy some Grand Marnier or Cointreau and die it blue. But that stuff is expensive, about $40 for a fifth, so I went with plan B: A bottle of grain alcohol (about $15) and some oranges.

I peeled two oranges and a lemon and put the peels in a pint-sized mason jar. I filled it with grain alcohol (it’s called Clear Spring) and added a really old vanilla bean. For good measure I also added a splash of the bourbon that the bean had been resting in, and three or four teaspoons of sugar.

Two days later, I had a very powerful brew. It was a lovely orange color (see photo) and drunk straight, was almost painful. The booze burned, but not nearly so much as the long, bitter orange aftertaste.

So I added some water, and found that I had created a liqueur with louche: it turned from clear to opaque when water was added to it, just like absinthe does. But it still didn’t taste very good, even when I added more water and more sugar. Adding blue food coloring made it look pretty cool, but didn’t help the taste.

As a last resort, I decided to actually look up a recipe for curacao. It turns out that it’s flavored with the peels of the bitter laraha fruit, which grows only on the island of Curacao, off the north coast of Venezuela. Maybe it’s supposed to be that bitter? I don’t know, but I’ve got half a bottle of Clear Spring left, so I’m going to try again.

Cocktail Recipe: The North Pacific Gyre

2009-11-17T22:50:00.001-08:00

The New York Times recently wrote about one of my favorite environmental nightmares, the islands of plastic trapped in ocean currents:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=gyre&st=cse

If you want to be accurate, follow these proportions, but make your drink twice the size of Texas:

1 1/2 shots vodka

1 teaspoon honey

Pour into a large bucket type cocktail glass and stir well. Let the honey dissolve for a while (don't use ice cold vodka)

Crush some ice

Add 2-3 shots of grapefruit juice and the crushed ice and stir

Run around the house in a swirling, whirlpool-like manner, collecting every small bit of plastic you can find, and cram it all into the glass

Top with soda

Cocktail Recipe: The Love Canal

2009-11-09T21:41:00.000-08:00

Don protective clothing.

Add to shaker:

Ice

1 shot rye whiskey

1/3 shot Black Seal rum

small drizzle molasses

Shake well and strain into a martini glass

Cocktail Recipe: Three Mile Island Iced Tea

2009-11-03T22:34:00.001-08:00

In a tumbler over ice pour:

1 shot bourbon

1/3 shot amaretto

1/3 shot blue Curacao

3 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Squeeze in and add a wedge of lemon

Stir well

Top with seltzer

ANGA over LNG

2009-10-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for LNG. Up in Astoria, a Clatsop County commissioner who supported LNG was recalled (pending a recount; she lost by only four votes). And the Oregon Department of Justice announced that it had enough evidence to convict a former Port of Astoria director of misconduct in the lease for the Skipanon Peninsula site — but he’s off the hook because of a statute of limitations.

However, the real blow to LNG comes from the natural gas industry itself.

A consortium called the American Natural Gas Alliance has started running ads that trumpet natural gas as the fuel of the future. And one of the best things about it, say the ads, is that we don’t have to import it.

I’m guessing that companies like Northwest Natural Gas and Pacific Gas & Electric, who are investing in infrastructure to import LNG, are pretty pissed off at ANGA (yes, that’s the acronym). According to the ads (and the website at http://www.newnaturalgas.org/) “we have more than 100 year’s worth of natural gas, right here in the States!”

The gist of the ads is that natural gas burns cleaner than coal (true enough), that it “makes solar and wind energy more viable,” and that there are such massive amounts of it buried right here in North American that we’ll never, ever, ever run out.

Strangely enough, I caught these ads from a motel room in Medford, Oregon, last night. It was the last night of my LNG-themed road trip. And the show I was watching, on CNBC, is called “American Greed.”

Update: LNG cocktail

2009-10-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

Regarding LNG Cocktail (see previous post): Turns out that even one is a bad idea. Euhck.

The LNG Cocktail

2009-10-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

2 oz. Russian vodka

shake over ice until very, very cold

strain into a cold glass and top with sparkling wine

One may occasionally appear necessary.

Three is never a good idea.

Road Trip: Coos Bay

2009-10-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

Day Three: Coos Bay

Highway 101 crosses the mouth of Coos Bay and heads into the town of North Bend and then, immediately, into the town of Coos Bay. At North Bend I left the highway and headed towards the Southwest Oregon Regional Airport, which appears on my map to be more or less across the water from Jordan Cove.

The Jordan Cove LNG project is owned by Fort Chicago Energy Partners and Energy Projects Development (Pacific Gas and Electric is part owner of the affiliated 234-mile pipeline). This is the one that the San Francisco City Council voted to oppose, although it’s over 100 miles north of the California border.

I parked in the lot of a Bureau of Land Management office building (closed, it was Saturday). The road looks down on the airport runways. The site where the LNG terminal would be build is further to the northwest, across the water. I needed to get around the tip of the headland I was on, and there just happened to be a paved hiking trail going in the right direction.

I headed up and into the woods. It was a dark, wet day, and the forest was thick and dripping. The trees and ferns and shiny salal bushes seemed to have black behind them, like the bark and leaves were painted onto black velvet. I came across a huge cement archway that was the entrance to a tunnel. It was covered in graffiti, and I didn’t get too close, but it looked like the kind of place where people would go to do drugs.

The South Coast forest combines all three kinds of creepy: There’s that nervous feeling you get walking through a bad part of town at night. The feeling you get way out in the woods when you start thinking about cougars. And the feeling you get alone in a 100-year-old house. I felt like I was equally in danger of getting knifed, mauled, or haunted.

Or falling down a hole and never being found.

I got to the edge of a cliff that looked out onto the water. There was an uncovered, manhole-shaped hole in the ground, totally unmarked. It was the opening to a pipe that went down into the cliff and spilled out partway down, over the water.

I took some photos of the opposite shore, but I felt like I was still too far east so I kept going.

I came out onto the street of a raw-looking subdivision. Most of the houses were new, interspersed with vacant lots for sale. You could see from the empty lots that the whole area used to be sand dunes and marsh grass. I walked by one cul-de-sac where nothing had been erected except for some fakey-old-fashioned lampposts and a big plywood sign advertising “Paradise Island.”

Further down, on the edge of the cliff, was an abandoned, unfinished condo complex. It was set of row houses, maybe ten, painted gray and boarded up. A warning notice dated August 3 stated that the building had been deemed “substandard” according to Coos Bay municipal code.

The back decks of the condos overlooked the water, with a perfect view of where, by my best guess, the Jordan Cove LNG project would be built. I got my photo and turned around.

On my way back through the subdivision, a gang of boys, maybe 12 and 13 years old, raced by on their bicycles. I worried about them going out the trail and falling into the pipe hole.

Road Trip: Warrenton

2009-10-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Today, Google Maps let me down.

It doesn’t mention when a road is private, or that it may not be what you’d really call paved.

Skipanon Drive sounded promising, seeing as how I was looking for a site on the Skipanon Peninsula, a little spit of land which sticks out into the Columbia River at Warrenton, close to where the river meets the ocean. The LNG project at Warrenton, funded by a company called Oregon LNG, makes a fair amount of sense as far as location goes — I guess — except for its connector pipe, which would cut across farms and forests for 117 miles to get to Molalla. But the terminal site, at least, is close to the ocean, in an area with a lot of other industry, and in place that, frankly, people don’t care too much about.

Astoria is gorgeous and verging on too touristy. But cross over to Warrenton on 101 and the scene totally changes. Instead of gothic Victorians and a gussied-up small town main street, you’ve got big box stores and ugly little spread-out houses.

I didn’t get too far on Skipanon Drive because it’s gated off: property of Wayerhauser. I could see piles of logs in the distance.

Nearby, though, I found a paved walking trail that looks like it was built over old railroad tracks. It seemed to be headed in the right direction to give me a view across the inlet to where the LNG terminal would be located, so I started walking. It’s a beautiful walk through the forest that opens out, at one point, for a view across the water. There’s bench where a sad-looking woman was sitting. She told me she didn’t know what the park was called.

Eventually the path ends at a place where they were moving big logs around with a crane. Other than that it was peaceful and felt like an oasis of unadulterated nature, with herons and frogs and tall reeds. I took a photo out across the inlet, towards what looked like the undeveloped other half of the peninsula, which may someday be covered with an LNG facility, the view blocked by huge tanker ships.

I returned to the car and decided to drive around the other way, to get closer to the actual site. According to my map, N.E. King Ave. would take me to Bay Fort Road, which supposedly goes straight to the proposed site.

Turns out, King is an unmaintained stretch that was once paved, but is now full of huge potholes (all full of muddy water, no way to tell how deep they are) with ragged shards of pavement sticking up here and there. The Honda handled it better than I expected, and after a long, bouncing time, we got to a big sandy clearing. No Bay Fort Road in sight, just a bunch of off-roader’s tracks going off in different directions into the sand, with tall bushes all around so you couldn’t get any sense of where the water is.

You couldn’t see if from far off, but the whole interior of the area is well-worn tracks in the sand, made by the tires of Jeeps and motorcycles, I think. It is so NOT pristine and untouched.

As I was leaving, a sedan came bucking way too fast up King Ave., full of grinning teenagers who were holding big wax-paper cups of soda in their hands. They disappeared into the scrub.

Moral of the day: If you want to fight LNG, you’re going to have to come up with a more concrete argument than the old, “but look at this place! You’ll ruin it!”

Road Trip: Bradwood Landing

2009-10-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

Bradwood Road is blocked off.

“No trespassing without permission,” reads a sign. “Violators will be prosecuted.”

Given that I’ll still apparently be trespassing, even with permission to cross the barrier, I decide not to chance it. Besides, this warning sign, along with another sign that reads “Bradwood: Clean Energy, Good Jobs” is enough to tell me I’m in the right place.

I’ve been driving up and down Clifton Road, which veers towards the Columbia River off Highway 30 at a point about 22 miles east of Astoria. I’m looking for the site where NorthernStar Natural Gas wants to build a terminal to receive liquefied natural gas, which would be shipped across the Pacific Ocean and up the Columbia to this godforsaken stretch of shoreline. The supercooled gas would be re-gassified here and shipped by pipeline across the state.

I’m wondering why they chose a place so far up the river, but as my bartender at the Fort George Brewery points out to me later, they needed a place that wasn’t too close to any major settlements. People get nervous about having large amounts of poisonous, flammable gas too close to their homes.

There are a few houses along Clifton Road — five, by my count, plus someone who lives in an Airstream trailer.

It’s really, really quiet out here and there are lots of birds. Pilings from long-gone piers stick out of the water and there’s a disused railroad track. I’m guessing that Clifton was a stop on the tracks back when the Bradwood Landing site was a lumber mill, with a port and company town, back in the early and mid 1900s. (It shut down in 1965.)

Although the water is deep and huge cargo ships travel further up the river than this, dredging would be required for the LNG terminal to work. The project is affiliated with a pipeline that would go from here all the way to east of Maupin. Standing out on the road, here, it’s hard to imagine the whole thing really happening. There are two other LNG proposals in the works right now, one nearby in Warrenton and one down the coast in Coos Bay. This seems like the worst option of the three — but it’s the only site I’ve visited so far. Stay tuned.

Road Trip: Trojan Park

2009-10-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

Trojan Park, just south of Ranier, Oregon, is a quiet, peaceful spot. A series of ponds surrounded by grass and trees are home to ducks and geese (I counted three different kinds.) I saw a tree that had been nearly gnawed through by a beaver and several blue herons. I didn’t see any people.

It was too cold for a picnic. The trees all around were turning yellow, red and orange. But it’s a nice place to walk, and I wonder if visitors are put off by the possibility of radioactive exposure.

The tell-tale reactor tower is gone. It was imploded in 2006, as part of a decommissioning process that began in 1992. Trojan operated for only 17 years, shut down by construction errors. Its original lease would have been up in 2011. The reactor core was shipped off to the Hanford Reservation, but, as far as I can determine from web research, a lot of spent fuel rods (aka “high-level radioactive waste”) are still buried on site.

I walked around on some foot paths, and then up onto a road so disused that it was slippery with moss. There’s a big picnic area with covered tables, and even a horseshoe pit, that looks pretty old. They look like they were there while the plant was operating.

At the end of the main road there’s an abandoned office building with an enormous parking lot. There’s a transfer station, and a huge sweep of high tension wires that cross the highway and loop up to the top of ridge.

Walking around, I almost start to feel sorry for the plant. Twelve hundred people worked here. Cheap, reliable power was being pumped into the grid. You could see how someone could get excited about the possibilities. How it might be pretty easy to brush off the down side. You know, the nuclear waste that remains lethal for thousands of years. It’s like not wanting to admit that your miraculous new medicine has terrible side effects.

What I really can’t figure out is why they named it Trojan. The condom jokes were inevitable, and even worse is the association with the Trojan Horse. Looks like a gift, turns out to be a killing machine. What were they thinking?

fluffy, faintly glowing bunnies

2009-10-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun story I picked up from a fun website: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org

[Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 7 October] A helicopter equipped with radiation detecting equipment has been used to scan almost 4000 hectares of the USA's Hanford nuclear reservation in search of radioactive rabbit droppings. The helicopter was able to map each of the slightly radioactive stools with GPS coordinates. Liquid wastes containing radioactive caesium and strontium salts were stored in underground tanks at Hanford, which rabbits routinely burrowed into. They developed an appetite for the radioactive salts, which resulted in slightly radioactive droppings. Dee Millikin, spokeswoman for CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co which is responsible for much of the environmental cleanup of central Hanford, said that the use of the helicopter - at a cost of some $300,000 - means that the droppings can be located and removed in a matter of days rather than the months that would have been needed for people to search for it on the ground. The droppings will be put into landfill at the Hanford site. Hanford was a plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors and associated processing facilities that which played a pivotal role in US defence for more than 40 years starting. The site is now undergoing environmental cleanup managed by the DoE.

To the moon

2009-10-11T21:27:00.001-07:00

Did we just blow up the moon? Just asking.

The Moonshot (circa 1969)

1 shot gin

2 shots clam juice

1 dash Tabasco

Shake with ice and strain into appropriate glass