It’s been about two decades since the government project began to preserve New Hampshire’s state butterfly, the Karner blue. Since then, the Karners have rebounded in their specially-conserved pine barrens near the Concord Municipal Airport.

This week, Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station will power down for the last time. Over the next few years, workers will move the radioactive fuel into storage, dismantle the plant, and clean up the site. The process is called decommissioning, and a lot of people are worried about safety, cost and where the nuclear waste will finally end up.

For more than five decades, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth has been a controversial fixture in Massachusetts. Love it or hate it, by May 31, the plant will produce its last watt and shut down for good.

Gulf of Maine lobstermen are casting around far and wide for new kinds of bait, now that federal regulators have cut herring quotas by 70 percent. Possible solutions range from the mass importation of a nuisance fish from the Midwest, to manufactured baits to pig hides.

This week a high-stakes conference in Providence is considering new measures that could help endangered North Atlantic right whales avoid life-threatening entanglements in fishing gear. These measures could also challenge Maine’s lobster industry, though.

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth pumps about a half-billion gallons of water from Cape Cod Bay into the plant every day. The water cycles continuously, passing through the plant’s condenser, and returning to the bay about 10 minutes later — and 30 degrees warmer.

Recently, part of Harkness Memorial State Park in Waterford caught fire. But this shoreline blaze wasn’t a disaster. It was actually a carefully-planned “burn” aimed at preserving what’s been called the “last remnant” of eastern prairie in Connecticut.