KUAC - Fairbanks

A $500,000 federal grant will help the University of Alaska Museum of the North preserve Bus 142, popularized by the book and movie “Into the Wild.”

The funding comes from the National Park Service and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through the Save America’s Treasures program. Angela Linn, a museum collections manager, said the award will help cover the costs for preserving the 1940s-era Fairbanks public transit bus.

“Freeze it and document it in its current state, because the most famous part of it was from 1992 when Chris McCandless was there,” Linn said.

McCandless’ death from starvation at the bus 30 years ago drew travelers from across the world, at least two of whom died trying to reach it. In 2020, a helicopter removed the bus from a spot near Denali National Park and Preserve and moved it to Fairbanks.

Linn said the first step in the preservation process is stabilizing the bus’ structure.

“Making it safe for people to walk around in it, for us to move the bus to the exhibit site,” Linn said. “But it’s also about preserving the surface of the bus both inside and outside, so that we can preserve all the graffiti and all the epitaphs that have been placed on the surface of the bus.”

Linn said the grant will cover the cost of hiring a preservation company to do the work.

“This very well-known and well-respected conservation team out of Pennsylvania, BR Howard and Associates,” Linn said. “And they’re the one who came last summer and did the condition assessment of it and prepared a proposal to us and we used that proposal to get the funding.”

Although the project is focused on preserving the bus as is, Linn notes that because it will eventually go on display outside, missing and broken windows will be replaced. The plan calls for exhibiting the bus behind the museum on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, in a fenced area protected by a shelter.

“So that the direct sun and the snow and the rain and the heavy-duty element exposure will be a little bit lessened,” Linn said.

Linn said another grant is being applied for to build the bus shelter. The museum is also working with the nonprofit group Friends of Bus 142 to raise money. Linn said the museum hopes to open the bus exhibit in 2024.

In the meantime the public can view the bus as it’s being worked on inside UAF’s Usibelli Building, as well as via webcam.

A North Pole woman is keeping her dogs away from a neighborhood gravel pit after a northern pike attacked and injured one of them last month.

Long time North Pole resident Shannon Dhondt says it was a warm September day when she stopped to let her two dogs cool off at the neighborhood gravel pit. 

“This is over off of Copper Street, off Dennis Road in North Pole,” she said. “Been our popular little spot for years, but not anymore.”

Dhondt says her chihuahua Mulan luckily wanted nothing to do with the water, but her husky-greyhound mix Murphy went down to the edge.  

“And out of nowhere, bam, here’s this big old huge fish, which, I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “Three feet, hanging off his muzzle, you know, and he starts shaking his head and this thing is holding on.”

Dhondt says Murphy pushed the toothy fish off with a paw, but then the pike bit Murphy’s leg. 

“It was on his paw long enough to get some really good teeth in there,” she said.

The fish flopped back into the water after Murphy finally got free. Dhondt says when she got him home, he proceeded to bleed heavily.

Dhondt has photos of her home that look like something from slasher movie. She says Murphy wouldn’t let her help. The wounds were numerous but shallow, and Murphy licked them until the bleeding stopped.

He’s fully recovered from the attack, and Dhont says she’s since spent some time researching northern pike.   

“Looked at them online, and number one, they’re gnarly. And number two, they get huge,” she said.

State fisheries biologist Klaus Wuttig says he’s never heard of pike biting a dog, but he’s not necessarily surprised.

“Pike are pretty prehistoric fish, you know — they don’t really have brains. They’re programmed to eat, right?” he said. “Pike are pretty renowned for hitting baby ducks, voles on the surface, and so the dog snout — could that activate a pike to strike? Surely.”

Wuttig says he’s been bitten by pike a few times, and it’s important to pry their jaws open rather than try to pull away. The fish have hundreds of tiny teeth that can result in a lot of cuts.

Dhont has a video that a friend shot of a pike — possibly the same one that bit her dog Murphy — going after a beaver in the gravel pit. She says nobody has been able to catch the fish.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is operating the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program facility, or HAARP, for 13 projects this month. The projects are the latest made possible by federal support for the ionospheric research facility in Gakona.

In 2021, the University of Alaska Fairbanks received a five-year, $9 million grant to establish and operate the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science at HAARP.

HAARP research support services lead Evans Callis says this month’s research campaign is funded by the National Science Foundation.

“They help us with the funding aspect to make the program happen, and we work directly with the scientists to make their work happen,” Callis said.

Callis calls the 10-day campaign, which runs through Oct. 28, unprecedented.

“The most experiments that we’ve had under our NSF grant that we’re currently operating under,” he said. “Also, the most diverse set of experiments that we’ve had.”

And it’s not all hard science. Among the projects is part two of an endeavor that uses HAARP’s high-power radio transmitter for art. It involves transmitting a signal into the ionosphere which can be picked by ham radio operators around the world and decoded into low-resolution TV images.

“Narrow band television video art — it also includes spoken word and sound art,” Callis said. “It’s kind of a collaborative work between the artist and the amateur radio community to kind of make the artwork happen.”

Canadian artist Amanda Dawn Christie first transmitted art via HAARP in 2019. The other dozen projects being conducted using the HAARP facility are scientific, including a NASA experiment that involves bouncing a signal off the moon.

“Very similar to ground penetrating radar actually,” Callis said. “You know we use that here on earth, but we’re applying it to figuring out the composition of asteroids, the moon, things like that.”

Another HAARP experiment aims to better understand a low-altitude, aurora-like atmospheric glow known as Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, or STEVE. Callis says the experiment uses HAARP’s transmitter to send out so-called hot electrons thought to cause STEVE.

“And if we see that air glow and it matches the wavelength of light that we see from naturally occurring STEVE, that would give us indication that the hot electrons are playing some role in the formation of STEVE,” he said.

HAARP was built to conduct experiments in the earth’s ionosphere, but another project happening this month employs it to probe a similar electrically charged region over Jupiter, the giant gaseous planet 374 million miles away.

“This is a first-of-its-kind experiment (which) at least to my knowledge has never been attempted before,” Callis said. “We transmit several different frequencies from HAARP directed at Jupiter. We listen for the echo that returns, and that should be able to tell us something about electromagnetic conditions around Jupiter.”

The wide array of projects underscores the enduring scientific research value of HAARP, which began in 1993.

Callis says it remains the most powerful and flexible instrument of its kind in the world, and attributes this month’s research campaign to the NSF funding which provides for maintenance and prolonged viability of the facility.

“And the sense of security that brings helps scientists feel more comfortable coming up with a proposal to make use of the facility,” he said.

Scientists with NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory and Los Alamos National Lab, as well as numerous universities, are involved in this month’s HAARP research campaign.

More than 300 refugees from the war in Ukraine have come to Alaska to settle, mainly near family in places with Slavic communities.

“We saw this immediate rush of people who applied right at the beginning of the program were approved, and then got their families here as quickly as possible,” said Issa Spatrisano, who oversees Refugee Resettlement and Food Resources for Anchorage-based Catholic Community Services. She also serves as Alaska’s state refugee coordinator.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine back in February, President Biden enacted the Uniting for Ukraine program to help those fleeing the conflict find temporary homes more quickly than through conventional refugee efforts. Since then, more than 54,000 have come to America under the program, including the more than 300 who came to Alaska.

Ukrainians also have come to the United States through other programs and as private citizens traveling on a visa.

Refugee-relief workers have been busy

Spatrisano said she and her staff have been busy over the past few months.

“Statewide, we’re seeing some serious growth in the refugee-resettlement program,” she said. “It’s the largest year in the state’s history — by far.”

Spatrisano said most of those who’ve arrived in Alaska under the Uniting for Ukraine program have family who applied to sponsor them to live in places where previous waves of Slavic-speaking immigrants have settled.

“The largest Ukrainian communities statewide, per Census data, are Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley and Delta Junction,” she said in an interview last week.

The earlier immigrants began coming to Alaska in the 1990s from nations that previously were part of the old Soviet Bloc.

“Many former Soviet Union arrivals independently decided to move to Alaska and decided to make their home (in communities) across the state,” Spatrisano said, “but especially in the area of Delta Junction.”

Spatrisano said in an interview last week that the pace of new arrivals had begun to slow.

“Alaska definitely should expect more cases,” she said, “but I don’t think we’re going to expect as many people as quickly as we saw them in the first opening of the program.”

A storm is on track to hit a portion of the area pummeled last month by the remnants of Typhoon Merbok. National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Berg said the new storm developing in Russia is anticipated to move north of the Siberian Peninsula toward Alaska midweek.

“And as it does that, it’s going to bring some strong southwesterly, south winds into areas —basically areas from Norton Sound north to Point Barrow,” he said.

Berg said as the front makes it inland, winds will turn more westerly, and some storm surge is expected.

“We’re looking right now at it being basically minor coastal flooding, but there could be quite a bit of erosion with the wind waves on top of the surge that may occur,” he said.

Berg said erosion could be worse due to damage done by last month’s major storm.

“Their defenses are down,” he said. “The berms that were built up over the years, have all been damaged, so any minor coastal flooding or high surf in those areas could cause erosion issues that will be a bigger impact than what they normally would be.”

A special statement from the National Weather Service says strong winds are expected to move into the Eastern Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea Wednesday afternoon with an elevated risk of coastal flooding from the Bering Strait to Point Hope Wednesday night into Friday. It says high surf is possible on south and west facing shores of Norton Sound.

Pentagon officials have taken another step toward building a small nuclear power plant for Eielson Air Force Base. On Monday, they released a request for proposals that invites contractors to outline how they’d design, build and deploy a so-called microreactor at Eielson within five years.

Air Force officials announced last year that they’d selected Eielson as the site of a pilot project that would prove the viability of small-scale nuclear power plants at military installations.

“This is really about energy resilience,” said Mark Correll, a former Air Force deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and infrastructure.

Correll said last November that the project at Eielson is meant to help demonstrate a microreactor’s capability to provide power in case the base’s main source of electricity — a 70-year-old, 15-megawatt coal-fired heat and power plant — goes offline.

“We’re looking to make sure that at any point in time, any of our bases with any mission will have the power it needs, where it needs it, when it needs it, in the quantities that it needs, to assure that we can continue to do the defense mission that we have,” he said.

The United Coalition for Advanced Nuclear Power is backing the Eielson project.

“There’s both a geopolitical reason, as well as an energy-resilience reason. Which is why Eielson is so exciting,” says Lucian Niemeyer, a principal with UCAN, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for nuclear-powered electrical generation.

Niemeyer says the Eielson microreactor may demonstrate that the technology holds promise for the Interior’s other remotely located military installations.

“Eielson relies on a coal plant with oil backup in a very critical area of the country,” he said in an interview Monday.

Critical because of the area’s national security assets — Eielson’s two squadrons of advanced F-35 fighters; Fort Wainwright’s airborne units; and the missile-defense installations at Fort Greely and Clear Space Force Station.

“Nuclear power can serve a significant capability to run these critical bases and assets on reliable power for a period of five to 10 years without refueling,” Niemeyer said.

The request for proposals calls for construction of a facility to accommodate a micronuclear reactor that would generate up to 5 megawatts and operate for 10 years, until its fuel is spent. The plan calls for construction to begin in three years and for the reactor to begin generating power in 2027.

Correll, who talked about the project in a news conference held after it was announced, said the microreactor would be self-contained in a structure that’s about the size of a CONEX shipping container that’ll be located in a site of about 5 acres. He said it won’t cost the Air Force any money upfront. Instead, it’ll pay for it through power purchases from the company that’ll build and operate it, at a rate that’s competitive with what the base pays now.

Niemeyer says the Pentagon and industry likely will learn a lot from how the facility performs.

“I think the lessons we learn from that are going to drive maybe a decision to start looking at other locations,” he said.

Air Force officials say they’ll conduct a conference and site visit to Eielson on Oct. 12 for industry representatives considering submitting proposals for the project.