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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?
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.
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
This bears watching to see what happens.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
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.
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'
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.