Restoring Salmon To Their Original Habitat -- With a Cannon

StartsWithABang writes Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?

Comments

just a little bigger...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we can have a shark cannon... that will attach lasers to their heads ... And put bees in their mouths.

The cold war with Russia is back baby!

Re:just a little bigger...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.

The engineering considerations surrounding such a device seem formidable indeed. Most of the data available are for humans(who, shockingly enough, have most of the medical budget dedicated to measuring delicate electrical signals through their muscle tissue); but if we assume that salmon tissue is approximately similar to human muscle, at least for the purposes of the currents and voltages a railgun implies, we can conclude that (A) the math is obnoxious. (B) fish are shitty conductors (C) fish have other obnoxious properties like 'capacitance' and non-homogenous conductivity.

Given the substantial resistance of our pisciform projectile, and the railgun's need for heroically high peak currents, supply voltage will have to be quite high, introducing additional insulation challenges, risks of air-gap breakdown between the rails, damaging arcs in other areas of the apparatus, and so on. Further issues may arise because of the projectile's non-uniform conductivity and substantial fluid content: with current flow, and resistive heating, highest along the most conductive regions, the projectile may exhibit substantial internal deformation, or even catastrophic loss of structural integrity, during acceleration or at a very early stage of flight. While it may have valuable specialty applications, this so-called 'frangible fish' effect markedly reduces effective range and almost entirely precludes survival of the projectile.

It is conceivable that advances in Aquatic-Preservation Discarding Sabot technology will allow a suitably packaged salmon to successfully traverse the accelerator rails while retaining the buoyancy necessary for continued survival by discarding the conductive jacket before entry into the target body of water. However, such developments are presently theoretical and cannot form the basis of a viable ecological dominance capability in the near term.

They are pussies

[Tablizer]

Can't they just evolve and grow legs to hike up? We did it, dammit!

Shoot, it's worth a try

[penguinoid]

Q: What did the fish say when it bumped into a concrete wall?
A: Dam!

It's not just a fish cannon.

[SuricouRaven]

It's an eagle entertainment device.

Re:It's not just a fish cannon.

[istartedi]

It's an eagle entertainment device.

This bears watching to see what happens.