Anna Canny

Inventor Lance McMullan has a beautiful house on Douglas Island. But he spends almost all of his time in the garage. 

On one side of the room there’s camping gear, a set of winter tires and a small couch. On the other, an enormous 3D printer and dozens of boxes and garbage bags filled with pieces of bright yellow plastic. 

He reached into one of the bags and pulled out a cracked triangular fin. 

“Every part has failed at some point or another,” McMullan said. “I just stay in this room working for days.”

All that time and discarded plastic is a testament to the device hanging from a rope in the center of the room — a sleek tube with a large rotor on one end. It turns powerful ocean currents into renewable electricity. 

“Anyone who has met me in the last 14 years, this is all they have heard about. It’s all I can think about,” McMullan said. “Like, I can’t look at the moon without thinking about another tidal cycle passing.”

McMullan isn’t the only one who’s excited. Tidal power could be an alternative to burning fossil fuels like diesel and natural gas, which is driving human-caused climate change. 

And the prospect of tapping into ocean energy has received a lot of buzz and a lot of federal money in Alaska. Especially in Cook Inlet, where proposed large scale tidal projects could eventually power thousands of homes. 

McMullan is starting smaller. His company, Sitkana, makes small tidal generators that are perfect for individual fishing boats and liveaboards. He hopes they can revolutionize ocean power the way rooftop panels revolutionized solar power.

“It’s just so much power, and it’s not being touched,” McMullan said.  “I feel like I have almost a responsibility to bring it to reality.”

Finding a niche for tidal power

Alaska has long been considered the ideal place for developing tidal power. Steep fjords and inlets along the coast amplify the natural rise and fall of tides. When water rushes into those channels, it’s concentrated into a strong current that’s perfect for generating electricity. 

“It’s kind of hard to go anywhere in Alaska without tripping over a good tidal energy site,” said  Brian Polagye, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington and a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory.

Because water is so dense, ocean power could be more potent than wind energy. And because tides are consistent and predictable, energy drawn from them could be more reliable than solar, which fluctuates with the weather and the seasons.

But it’s far less popular. That’s mostly because it costs a lot more. 

“If tidal power was the cheapest form of energy, it would be as ubiquitous as a solar panel,” Polagye said.

Standardized designs and mass manufacturing of parts has drastically reduced the cost of solar and wind energy technology over time. So when a tidal project tries to tap into a large grid like the Railbelt, it has to compete with those much cheaper alternatives.

But Polagye says tidal energy could find success by exploiting unique niches in the market. In Alaska, that might mean building in remote places where the grid is less robust. 

He points to the village of Igiugig, which is experimenting with a similar turbine that generates electricity using currents from the Kvichak River. 

“The turbine there is really the best source of power. It’s competing with diesel that’s flown in,” Polagye said. “The fact that it is more expensive than other sources that would be on the grid doesn’t matter if you don’t have a grid.”

Sitkana’s tidal turbines may be best suited to diesel-dependent coastal communities like Angoon, Hoonah and Kake in Southeast Alaska, where energy prices are much higher than in the Lower 48. 

Those places have explored solar and hydropower, but large utility projects take a lot of time and money to build. And as communities adopt things like electric vehicles and electric heat pumps in an effort to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions, demand for renewable energy keeps growing. 

Experts say decarbonization will likely require a mix of renewables. McMullan believes that mix should include tidal power. 

The Chinook 3.0

His effort to make ocean energy accessible began while he was working as a deckhand on a troller in Sitka. From the back of the boat, he would watch the hooks bobbing through water and imagine a tidal generator that could be dragged along like that. 

“It was that summer I started sketching designs,” McMullan said. “But I realized I had no idea what they were or if I could make them work. I didn’t know anything about fluids or mechanical engineering.”

So he went back to school to study engineering, then spent time as a maintenance technician building wind turbines in the Lower 48 before returning to Alaska.

It took him years to develop Sitkana’s current prototype, the Chinook 3.0. The small tidal turbine has a few key differences compared to other tidal generation designs. 

While many tidal projects are anchored to the ocean floor, the Chinook 3.0 is free-floating and portable. It weighs less than a hundred pounds.

“It swims through the water sort of like a fish,” McMullan said. “And installing these is no different than dropping an anchor.” 

The Chinook 3.0 can be hooked up to a small crane or pulley on the back of the boat, then lowered when the tide is rising or falling. 

Tidal currents spin the rotor, which turns a generator inside the body of the turbine to create 1.6 kilowatts of electricity. That’s enough to meet one person’s daily needs, assuming the generator stays in the water for most of the day. 

So a family might need multiple generators. But at just over $1,000 per kilowatt, the cost of energy is relatively low — comparable to the price of wind power. That’s thanks in large part to the Chinook 3.0’s plastic construction. 

Using plastic might also be a solution to maintenance problems, another common hurdle for tidal power. The ocean’s powerful currents and corrosive seawater are harsh on tidal turbines. Constant repairs can disrupt power and challenge communities that might not have the expertise or manpower to keep the turbines running. So Sitkana plans to let the ocean do its worst.

“What we’re doing is accepting that these are going to get destroyed,” McMullan said. 

When a generator breaks, they’ll pull it out, replace it, and recycle the plastic from the broken unit. 

Soon, McMullan will send the Chinook 3.0 prototype across the country, to a tidal testing facility in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There, they’ll monitor the turbine in the water to see how fish and other wildlife respond to it. 

“But we’re getting very close. It’s here, it works,” McMullan said. “Now it’s just about scaling it and getting it out there and producing the power.”

Sitkana expects that the generators will hit the market sometime next year, for about $2,000 each. 

Correction: A previous version of this story referred to the price of energy in cost per kilowatt hours. Cost is measured per kilowatt.

Marc Wheeler lives in downtown Juneau, close to the Foodland grocery store. He often stops there for lunch. That’s when he sees the parking lot’s resident ravens.

“I’ll be like walking while I eat it, and they’ll literally follow you like a gang of thugs,” Wheeler said. “Cause they’re just counting on you dropping something.”

Like many Juneauites, Wheeler has had a lot of fun watching the curious corvids that wander around town, but he noticed that most of them disappear at sundown. 

“Where’s the roost?,” Wheeler asked for this installment of Curious Juneau. It took some nighttime detective work to find out. 

The first lead came from Bob Armstrong, a naturalist and wildlife photographer who has been working in Juneau for more than 60 years. 

He’s photographed hundreds of ravens. One of his favorite shots from Foodland shows a bird with a bright red cup of Raven’s Brew coffee. The picture was carefully staged.

“I came into the parking lot and just put some latte in it and just set it up 20 feet away from the car and just sat there and waited,” Armstrong said.

Within a few minutes, a half dozen birds started circling it. Eventually, one took the lid in its beak and lifted the cup to show off an illustrated raven with its wings outstretched.

“But then what surprised me is it opened the lid of the cup – it had to snap it off – and then drank the latte that was in there,” he said. 

Ravens are scavengers, meaning they spend their days looking for something — anything — to eat. Insects, berries, eggs paired with trash from the landfill and lattes.  

That explains why they hang out near Foodland looking for scraps. But their roosting habits are more mysterious. Despite decades of observation, Armstrong couldn’t tell me where ravens go at bedtime. Tracking them precisely would probably require tagging them.

Scientists in Fairbanks have used radio-transmitter tags to track urban ravens on a forty mile commute to their roosts in spruce trees outside the city.

KTOO doesn’t have the budget for radio transmitters. At least, not that kind of radio transmitter. So this study would need to be more low-tech. 

Armstrong did have one idea. He suggested the spruce trees on Willoughby Avenue. 

“Because if I go to Bullwinkle’s for pizza at night or something and come out at night, and then walk along that sidewalk there, I hear a lot of ravens talking from the trees in total darkness,” he said. 

A rainy Tuesday night stake-out revealed no ravens in the trees. But there was some evidence in the echoey, dimly lit parking garage of the State Office Building. 

The first sign of ravens were spikes along the railing, installed by people to keep birds out. Clearly, they didn’t work well, because the concrete railing on the garage’s third floor was covered in white bird poop, and there were a few black feathers left behind in the parking spaces. 

The most significant clue was a nest, about a foot across, that was nestled in a few U-shaped pipes in a corner of the garage. It appeared empty, but it was a sure sign of raven residency. 

To find a raven roost, one must get inside the mind of the bird. John Marzluff, a retired professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, has spent his career doing just that. He’s a corvid expert who has studied crows, jays and ravens.

“There are kind of two strategies in a raven society,” Marzluff said. 

The first is for the older breeding pairs. Mates roost together.

“Those birds typically roost in a pretty consistent place on their territory, night after night after night,” Marzluff. 

They’re fiercely protective of that territory, especially when they’re tending to a nest like the one in the parking garage. 

“The rest of raven world are what we call vagrant non-breeders,” Marzluff said.

Those ravens are the most low-ranking in the bunch. They aren’t tied to a particular spot that they’re defending or returning to every day. 

“They may aggregate at rich food sources like Foodland,” Marzluff said. “But it’s not the same birds every day, you know, day in and day out. To say that there’s a flock or a group that’s the “Foodland ravens” — probably not the case.”

They’re just ravens that happen to be at Foodland. 

And that makes sense because ravens move around a lot to follow food. Marzluff’s research has shown that they travel thousands of square miles for their next meal. They’re flexible based on the changing seasons and the surprise delicacies that might appear. 

“If all sudden there’s a big spill of a bag of dog food at Foodland, that word is gonna get out,” Marzluff. “Because the birds that are there will be very active and other birds will hear or see them and come in.”

Marzluff research has revealed that ravens, especially the vagrant non-breeders, use their roost as an “information center.” They’ll meet up with dozens or even hundreds of ravens to “talk” about food sources or predator threats that they encountered during the day.

These roosts are typically found in tree stands or on cliffs, but in an urban environment that might change. A parking garage, for instance, is usually close to easy food. 

“It’s also warm, and it’s also sheltered from the elements, and maybe even a little bit lighter so they can see any oncoming potential predator,” Marzluff said. “It might just be the perfect place.”

While the State Office Building’s parking garage was empty, the parking garage of the downtown library turned out to be a jackpot just past 10 p.m. on a Thursday night.

One the top level, 13 ravens – a superstitious grouping – perched on the lamps, pipes and crevices in the ceiling. 

They declined an interview, which makes sense. It’s pretty rude for a reporter to break into their home while they’re sleeping.

A bill to ban harmful “forever chemicals” in firefighting foams passed the Alaska House and Senate by wide margins Wednesday. Now it’s on the way to Gov. Mike Dunleavy to be signed into law.

The legislation was sponsored by Democratic Senator Jesse Kiehl of Juneau. It prohibits the use of firefighting foams containing a class of man-made chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, which have polluted drinking water across Alaska and the rest of the country.

“I had a good conversation with some of the Governor’s folks and I’m excited to get this to his desk,” Kiehl said following the vote. “I think we can prevent any more poison drinking water from this stuff. And that’s going to benefit everybody.”

Kiehl pushed for similar provisions last year, tucking them into a house bill that made it to the Governor’s desk, but the governor vetoed it.

Exposure to even small doses of PFAS has been linked to health problems like liver damage, high cholesterol and various kinds of cancer. They’re known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment, leading to persistent pollution of water and soil. 

“It’s toxic in such tiny concentrations,” Kiehl said. “It’s just a public safety protection we have to make.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency introduced the first enforceable limits for PFAS in drinking water. Now, public water systems have five years to accomplish the expensive and complicated task of cleaning up their PFAS-contaminated water.

“The cost of dealing with legacy contamination is a national problem and it’s almost nightmarish in scope and price tag,” Kiehl said. “This bill is really focused on making sure that we don’t have any more to deal with here.”

In Alaska, firefighting foams, which are often used to fight fuel fires at airports or military bases, are believed to be the single biggest source of forever chemicals in the environment.

At the federal level, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense are also already working to transition away from PFAS fire fighting foams.

Kiehl’s legislation does make an exception for the oil and gas industry. PFAS firefighting foams are still permitted for fires coming from fossil fuel production, transmission, transportation, or refining until the federal government identifies a safe and effective alternative.

The bill also allows the state to reimburse small, rural communities for the cost of PFAS foam disposal. 

Correction: A previous version of this story said that the state would buy back PFAS foam to dispose of it. Instead, communities will be responsible for disposal, but the state will reimburse their costs. 

The mountain goat is one of nature’s most skilled mountaineers. The hooved herds make their way through harsh Alpine terrain with relative ease. And they’ve been living with mountain snow since the Ice Age.

According to wildlife ecologist Kevin White, that also means that they live amid avalanche paths.

“And they would have no way of knowing that,” White said. “They can’t login to the avalanche forecasters’ website.”

White is a scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast and the University of Victoria who has been tracking mountain goats to see how they meet their end. It turns out, avalanches are a leading cause of death.

According to a new study published in the journal Communications Biology, snow slides have taken out up to 22% of the goat population in the most extreme years. The research, led by White and collaborators from the University of Alaska and institutions in Montana and Switzerland, shows the scale of that mortality for the first time.

Scientists know a lot about goats’ relationship with snow. Heavy snowfall can bury food or make it more difficult for goats to move around, which can have a negative effect on survival. 

But the role of avalanches has always been unclear, in part because a lot of mountain goat research is conducted in the summer, and in part because avalanche paths are remote and hard to access. 

“Avalanche shoots are often a tangle of alders and Devil’s Club and salmonberry and difficult hiking to get to those sites,” White said. 

White spent nearly 20 years trekking to these locations to do detective work on goat deaths, first with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and later as a researcher who processed that data with funding from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.

He spent countless hours hovering above mountainsides in helicopters and small planes, where he first targeted goats from a distance with tranquilizers before fitting them with a GPS collar. 

White collared 421 goats in Klukwan, Lynn Canal, Baranof Island and Cleveland Peninsula. Then, he waited for them to die.

Some caught disease. Some couldn’t get enough food. Some were caught by predators. A lot of those deaths were the youngest and the oldest, the most vulnerable in the population.

“But in the case of avalanches, it’s essentially selecting individuals out of the population at random,” White said.

Meaning avalanches can take out goats that are in the prime of their lives, including females who are the perfect age for reproduction. That can be a tough loss for local populations. 

According to University of Alaska Southeast snow scientist Eran Hood, a co-author on the study, the new research also revealed a surprising coincidence. Avalanche-prone slopes are usually between 30 and 45 degrees — shallow enough for snow to accumulate, but steep enough for gravity to eventually pull it down. 

“Well it turns out that the most common slope angle for mountain goat habitat is in the forty degree range,” Hood said. “So basically, the range of terrain where they like to hang out is right in the center of the most common slope angle for avalanches.” 

If goats are risking their lives by spending time in avalanche terrain, the researchers believe there must be an evolutionary trade-off that offsets the enormous loss of life. Figuring out what, precisely, it is will require more research. 

Avoiding predators who can’t make it up that high in the mountains is one possibility. Another is that snow slides unbury the food. 

“Those slopes may green up sooner in the spring. And the first flush of green vegetation has really high nutritional quality,” White said. “In some areas appears to coincide with when female mountain goats are giving birth to their kids, which requires a lot of energy.”

On average, avalanches caused 8% of annual mountain goat deaths. In some years, they caused none. And in the most extreme years, in the most extreme locations, they caused 22% of deaths in the population.

Avalanche risk varies a lot from year to year, Hood said. So it’s important for wildlife managers to keep that in mind when setting annual hunting limits. 

“If you knew in a winter that 22% of the population got taken out by avalanches, you should certainly be considering that in decisions you make with regard to harvest,” he said.

And as climate-sensitive mountain goats adapt to rapidly changing high mountain conditions, with more temperature variability and changing snow patterns, their relationship with avalanches may continue to change too.

On a recent sunny Friday in Juneau, Lindsey Bloom was eager to get outside and enjoy the spring weather. 

“I was like ‘Okay, I’m just going to go for a little paddleboard. I’m gonna just watch the sun sparkle on the water and that’s gonna like light me up from just a day of emails,” Bloom said.  “I mean it just seemed so … just so benign.”

At Bloom’s home on Lena Loop Road, the ocean is practically part of the backyard. She goes paddle boarding often, but this particular afternoon was far from routine. 

A few minutes into her paddle, she spotted a pod of orcas — four or five of them — out on the horizon. She took a video to send to her parents. But then she spotted something in the water.

“I looked down, and I saw this white color coming up from under. And I was like, ‘Huh, a dead halibut is floating belly up under my paddleboard,'” Bloom said. “And then her fin sliced up out of the water, and she exhaled.”

Before she knew what was happening, a large female killer whale lifted Bloom’s paddleboard up out of the water.

“And at that moment it was like terror,” Bloom said.

In Juneau, people share the land with bears, eagles, whales and more. It’s one of the reasons people love living here, but earlier this month, a handful of close encounters with a curious killer whale reminded people of the city’s wildness.

As her board was bobbing, Bloom stood frozen with fear as the whale circled her a half dozen times, diving down under her and then twisting around to look up at the surface. Bloom says she made eye contact with the young orca.

“And then I started talking to her, I was like ‘I have kids. Please go away.’”

Eventually, the whale did go away and Bloom was able to make it to shore safely, though she was shaken up.

Later that afternoon, the whale sidled up to Matt Musslewhite’s red skiff. He was sailing near Point Louisa, just a few hundred yards down the shoreline. When he saw the whale’s black fins glistening on the surface of the water, he cut the engine to let it safely pass.

“Instead she just turned and charged right up to me and ran her dorsal fin down the side of the boat, and circled round the boat a couple of times,” Musslewhite said. “Then (she) took off to join the rest of her pack.”

Musslewhite said the whale was gentle.

“I think she might have been a teenager, a curious teenager just coming to check out my boat,” he said.

Marine Mammal Specialist Suzie Teerlink with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there were at least three reports of close encounters with this orca, who was in fact a teenager, on April 26. But no one has been able to identify the specific whale or the pod it belongs to. 

 

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In a social media video taken by another paddler, the whale splashes around, making circles before poking her head out and spraying from her blowhole. 

Teerlink said that most of the time killer whales will keep their distance when they come across people.

“At the same time, they’re really smart, really curious animals,” she said. “They’re at home in their environment and if something strikes their curiosity they might push that envelope.”

There are no local reports of killer whales pursuing humans to hurt them. But there have been reports of pods attacking boats in other parts of the world. 

Teerlink says it’s best for both whales and people to keep our distance.

“We don’t want killer whales, you know, individuals to get too comfortable going up to people to get too comfortable going up to people,” she said.

So if you encounter a whale yourself, the best thing to do is move away as quickly as possible.

Orcas tend to migrate over large areas relatively fast. So while they’re pretty common in Juneau, the curious teenage whale and her pod have probably left the area by now.

Bloom said learning more about orca’s curious nature has calmed her fears a bit. She feels there’s an inherent stigma around the meat-eating marine mammals, which made her more afraid.

“We call them killer whales,” Bloom said. “Why do we have to call them that? Because it makes them scarier than they need to be.”

And in the week since the close encounter, she’s come to appreciate it, in a way.

“This is so Alaska,” Bloom said.  “All you gotta do is walk out your front door, and it’s like epic.”

But for now, she plans to paddleboard on Auke Lake instead. 

 

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Shannon Kelly stood in the median at the intersection of Egan Highway and Mendenhall Loop Road, facing a line of heavy traffic.

She was waving a poster board sign that read “Budget deficit? Con Job,” written in bold marker.

At a red light, a few passing drivers showed their support by flashing a thumbs up or beeping. 

“I love the honks,” Kelly said.

Kelly’s son is a junior at Thunder Mountain High School, just up the road.

But next year, he’ll have to move downtown for school. That’s because in February, the Juneau School Board voted for a plan that will move all high schoolers to Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé and all middle schoolers to Thunder Mountain’s building. It’s an effort to address the district’s financial woes.

Kelly and other Thunder Mountain parents feel the new arrangement is bad for students. And they feel the board failed to understand this year’s budget and the $7.9 million dollar deficit that came with it. So they’re here, petitioning on a Sunday afternoon, in an effort to recall School Board President Deedie Sorenson and Vice President Emil Mackey. 

“It’s just ridiculous what they’ve done to our kids,” Kelly said. “These kids who are juniors, you know, they already lost their 8th grade year to covid and now they’re losing their senior year because these people made decisions without community input and it’s garbage.”

Kelly said her son envisioned having his senior year at Thunder Mountain. Now, rather than switch schools, he plans to finish his graduation requirements with summer courses or homeschool.

Melissa Loggy is also a Thunder Mountain parent, with two teenage daughters.  But she says the recall effort is not meant to pit the two campuses against each other. 

“I am not just for TM,” Loggy said. “I am for two high schools.”

The petitioners would prefer to blend middle schoolers and high schoolers for a 7th through 12th grade model at both campuses. 

But the board already considered that idea, and voted against it, back in March.

According to Mackey, a 7-12 arrangement would do little to close the budget gap. 

“Because it costs more money. It costs a lot more money,” Mackey said. “And it doesn’t really fit the facilities.”

He added that it would cause overcrowding at Thunder Mountain and more staff layoffs across the district. 

Sorensen, the board President, knows the consolidation plan has been difficult for students and parents. 

“I understand that the displacement has caused a great deal of angst for a segment of the community,” Sorensen said. “But I feel that we made the best decision for the greatest number of students.”

And Sorensen and Mackey agree that the district’s budget challenges go far beyond this year’s deficit. Districts across the state have been running low on funds for years.

State money for schools has lagged behind the rate of inflation. And now, districts have to go without the federal money that floated them through the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, Mackey, who is currently serving his third term on the board, says the number of students in Juneau is declining. 

“This needs to be done,” Mackey. “Ever since I’ve been elected to the board in 2015, this problem has been kicked down the road.”

Sorensen and Mackey are both set to serve their terms through 2025. That makes them the only members of the board who are eligible for recall. Two members were elected just last fall and the remaining three are up for reelection this fall, which makes them ineligible.

Mackey said he’s heard from plenty of community members that support the board’s decision, but at a petition table in front of Safeway in the Mendenhall Valley, there were plenty of people, like Ashley Anderson, who didn’t.

“If I could sign it 100 times I would,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s children are younger. Her daughter attends Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen Elementary — which will stay open under the consolidation plan — but her son attends Floyd Dryden, which will close. All of the middle schoolers will end up in the same building.

Anderson said she worries about bullying or more competitive sports try-outs at the bigger school. She also worries about what will happen when her son moves on to high school. 

“Having him go all the way to Juneau-Douglas scares me,” Anderson. “We live all the way out in the Valley, and it’s not feasible for our family.”

The petitioners need to gather at least 2,359 signatures from eligible Juneau voters in order to get the recall on the ballot. They’ve been at it for about three weeks now, and by the latest estimate they have just under 1,000.

If the recall succeeds, five of the seven school board seats will be vacant this fall. None of the petitioners are eager to fill those spots. 

Sorensen had planned to retire at the end of her regular term next year, but Mackey said he’d run again.

Correction: An earlier version of this story used an outdated name for Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen Elementary School.