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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?
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!
I get pretty pissed off when people say that hydroelectric power is "cheap" or "free" or "clean" energy, or that all the money to build the dams came from the Federal government so everyone should enjoy the benefits.
It DOES have ongoing costs to people who live in the region, and they aren't small. While some recreational activities are created, others are lost, so that's a zero-sum. But then there are the other ecological costs: loss of fish and fisheries for many thousands of square (not to mention linear) miles of waterway. There is the loss of land behind the dam which was often (perhaps typically) farmland. And so on.
There are many other factors: wildlife typically will no longer migrate across the reservoir, leading to loss of habitat. Etc. etc.
It ain't free, and people in the region do pay for it.
Can't they just evolve and grow legs to hike up? We did it, dammit!
Table-ized A.I.
Use the cannon to shoot them into an oven so I can enjoy salmon meals much easier, goddammit.
Q: What did the fish say when it bumped into a concrete wall?
A: Dam!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It's an eagle entertainment device.
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.
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.
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.
Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Because social costs happen to be whatever numbers you decide to pull out of your ass that day. But even if we were to somehow find a valid and objective means to calculate such social costs, you would find that hydroelectric wouldn't far that well simply because it kills more people per watt of generated power, causes more environmental damage per watt, and prevents the use of more land for normal human activities per watt of generated power - all of these include the effects of meltdowns.
Alpha Centuri had the ability to raise/lower terrain with terra former units... It also had a weather model good enough that this effected rainfall and thus nutrient production. It wasn't usually an efficient use of resources; but building 'moisture walls' and then watching your hapless opponent's population starve sure was sweet...
Not me! Did you watch the video? It's an awesome idea, and I just couldn't stop laughing!
Hydroelectric dams are "green" now?!?! Then it goes on to describe the devastation they cause to the environment up and down the river?
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.
I haven't performed the calculations behind it but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's cheaper than nuclear power
Then do the calculations before spouting off publicly and anonymously about it.
it's clean because using the power produces no big emissions(apart from manufacturing replacement parts).
Emissions are not the only type of pollution that matters. Hydro dams mess up ecosystems rather badly in a lot of cases. They might be the least worst alternative but "clean" in this case is only a relative term. They are certainly not consequence free.
also the thing with salmon is tha wild salmon from the rivers wouldn't fill the supermarkets anyways - it's just a sport... a niche sport.
Salmon serve ecological purposes beyond simply occupying space in grocery stores and providing entertainment for fishermen. Salmon are important parts of food chains and dams tend to interrupt this food chain with sometimes serious consequences.
With Cannons. At least the nature documentaries will be more interesting. Maybe combine it with pumpkin chunking...
I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium
From these humblest origins of freight -- where the simple brain of a duck determines terminus loci -- human kind has leveraged the Duck Foot Apparatus into a vast global network with computer-optimized logistics management. Producers and shippers of commodities no longer need to wait until they are stepped on or eaten by a duck. This confers numerous advantages for cargo weight and scheduling and the ability to choose destination.
Early inventors believed you merely needed to graft duck feet onto Medieval torture devices to harness the abilities of ducks. In the Wright Brothers' first aircraft design running duck feet gathered the seeds of grass and mosses during takeoff. The goose neck trailer arose from early attempts to shove large volumes of freight down the neck of a beheaded goose, until it was discovered that large swinging doors in back facilitate deeper penetration and ease of loading.
Anyway, "the rest is history", and what the hell does that mean?? From milligrams to mega tonnes, the modern network of Things That Do Duck Things though they no longer resemble ducks carries invasive species to every "corner" of the globe. And what the hell does that mean??
Ocean shipping networks carry so much freight you can see their routes arching and sagging on this map. This is partially offset by the buoyant effect of air cargo.
To those of us old enough to remember air travel in the bowels of fowls, what a marvel modern transportation is indeed.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>