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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?
The original article:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8...
Whooshh Innovations
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
But Hydroelectric is incredibly safe when you look at all other forms of energy production. It certainly has never displaced as many people or killed as many people as nuclear.
Oh wait!
The halo effect describes cognitive bias people have about others based on an impression. It applies to industry just as much as it applies to people. Look at the full lifecycle cost of anything and nothing is really without issues, especially hydroelectric power which currently wins top prize as worst accident by death toll ever though the Chinese government list it as a natural disaster.
When ducks suddenly emerge from a pond covered with duck-weed, I have twice seen these little plants adhering to their backs; and it has happened to me, in removing a little duck-weed from one aquarium to another, that I have unintentionally stocked the one with fresh-water shells from the other. But another agency is perhaps more effectual: I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium, where many ova of fresh-water shells were hatching; and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken out of the water they could not be jarred off, though at a somewhat more advanced age they would voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched molluscs, though aquatic in their nature, survived on the duck's feet, in damp air, from twelve to twenty hours; and in this length of time a duck or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles, and if blown across the sea to an oceanic island, or to any other distant point, would be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet.
Actually, the problem is indeed the downstream trip, but not like that. A fish heading downstream naturally navigates towards the fastest flowing water channel... which in this case is the turbine intake.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
One doesn't need to be an expert to observe this effect in action. And some of it is painfully, mallet whacking on the head, obvious.
For example, no new nuclear plant has started construction in the US since the late 70s (the little bit of recent construction has all happened at existing nuclear plants).
Then in Japan there's the scuttling of an entire generation of nuclear plants in the decade 1995-2005 which led directly to the pre-earthquake decision (beginning of 2011) to keep the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, reactor 1 operating for another ten years rather than shutting down and decommissioning the reactor at the end of April, 2011.
Lack of options has forced these countries to make unsafe decisions, particularly to extend the lifespan of older less safe reactors.