Slashdot Mirror
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?
Would these be the inflated waste storage costs paid to store the waste in the least safe and most expensive manner possible because the anti-nuclear lobby has campaigned to prevent the nuclear industry from storing the waste in the sensible places they originally intended to?
Also, hydroelectric doesn't scale. Need twice as much energy? Too bad, there's only so much flow through the river and only so many places where it can be sensibly dammed up. Meanwhile, nuclear scales nicely.
"But at least there aren't meltdowns..."
Ever seen a dam break? Look up the number of casualties due to dam breaks in the last 50 years vs the number of casualties due to nuclear meltdowns in the last 50 years. Then divide by watts.
I cannot independently confirm the truth of this; but I was told, in all apparent seriousness, by someone I know well and who I know to have a long association with the hydroelectric generation business, that the term for what happens to a fish that fails to avoid the turbine intakes is "turbine induced stress". As one might imagine, this 'stress' tends toward the lethal end of the spectrum.
The problem is that you kill just as large a percentage on the downstream trip, largely due to dissolved gas bubbles in their flesh due to dramatic pressure changes. So even if you can get the adult salmon upstream to spawn, the baby salmon can't survive the downstream trip because they get the bends.
Even if they get past all of the dams, they have to go past the mildly radioactive section around Hanford and then the rather polluted Columbia River Estuary below Bonneville Dam.
If a nuclear plant failed due to a natural event that caused a massive amount of water to accumulate in one area, people would be calling for all nuclear plants of every design to be dismantled, and would be saying that nuclear is unsafe.
I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. Banqaio was a massive disaster, killing an estimated 171,000 people, and making millions homeless. Yet we don't see calls to dismantle all dams, or that dams are inherently unsafe.