Dam Shame: 60,000 Could Lose Homes For Controversial China Hydropower

[RickBradford]

^^Potosi

Why has nuclear become so expensive? The normal trend is that technologies become cheaper as they mature.

Is it something to do with extra safety requirements nowadays or does the price include the cost of decommissioning old plants, or has the price of uranium gone up? Or a combination?

[folium]

^^Potosi

Why has nuclear become so expensive? The normal trend is that technologies become cheaper as they mature.

Is it something to do with extra safety requirements nowadays or does the price include the cost of decommissioning old plants, or has the price of uranium gone up? Or a combination?

Have a read of this which sadly highlights the likely demise of nuclear as a viable alternative or stopgap in the transition from fossil fuels...

http://www.economist.com/node/21549098

[folium]

Actually, dam failures and overtoppings have probably caused more fatalities than all nuclear accidents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It's serious stuff. A landslide into a reservoir created a 200 metres tall wave in 1963 in Italy, that thing rolling down the valley makes the boxing day tsunami positively fun in comparison. 2,000 victims in this incident. Nuclear has become so expensive that it isn't a viable alternative anymore, though. $10 billion+ for a 1,000MW reactor, that's ridiculous. Germany has been dismantling the old Soviet style reactor on the Baltic shore of former East Germany since 1990, costs so far Euro 5 billion.

Sorry but this is nonsense.

Banqiao in 1975 and Vaiont in 1963, plus Machchu in India in 1979, killed approximately 115,000 people at worst. Other dam failures/overtopping barely register in terms of sizeable fatalities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki clocked up circa 200,000 deaths probably more. Deaths from the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 are probably unknowable with estimates varying from 4000 to 200,000.

[Potosi]

^^Potosi

Why has nuclear become so expensive? The normal trend is that technologies become cheaper as they mature.

Is it something to do with extra safety requirements nowadays or does the price include the cost of decommissioning old plants, or has the price of uranium gone up? Or a combination?

Nuclear power has always been a corporate-communism utopia becoming reality. Taxdollars pay for the construction, and later dismantling of the plants, and the still unsolved issue of disposing of the waste. In between, the utility corporations get the plants for free, and have only the operating costs to set against the profits. Tax cuts on them to add insult to injury. Cost overruns have been massive ever since the inception of nuclear power, and if a new one is calculated to cost $10 billion today, it's more like $25 billion when the construction is finished. One out of two will never go online for all sorts of issues, so make that $50 billion. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-cost.html

[Potosi]

Actually, dam failures and overtoppings have probably caused more fatalities than all nuclear accidents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It's serious stuff. A landslide into a reservoir created a 200 metres tall wave in 1963 in Italy, that thing rolling down the valley makes the boxing day tsunami positively fun in comparison. 2,000 victims in this incident. Nuclear has become so expensive that it isn't a viable alternative anymore, though. $10 billion+ for a 1,000MW reactor, that's ridiculous. Germany has been dismantling the old Soviet style reactor on the Baltic shore of former East Germany since 1990, costs so far Euro 5 billion.

Sorry but this is nonsense.

Banqiao in 1975 and Vaiont in 1963, plus Machchu in India in 1979, killed approximately 115,000 people at worst. Other dam failures/overtopping barely register in terms of sizeable fatalities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki clocked up circa 200,000 deaths probably more. Deaths from the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 are probably unknowable with estimates varying from 4000 to 200,000.

Confirmed Chernobyl fatalities are 64. I don't know how many cancers it produced, anyones guess almost 30 years later. Here is a list of dam failures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures

Many of the disaster don't have a number of fatalities attached, like the Johnstown flood. More than 2,200. Others didn't make the list. The biggest Russian plant in Shushenskoje had 75 fatalities in 2009 when the engine rooms were flooded. Some data is conflicting, the same wikipage claims 171,000 victims at the top for Banqiao.

Edited March 22, 2013 by Potosi

[NeverSure]

Dams, like a lot of things, have a life expectancy. Eventually, they fill with silt.

That's news to me. The major dams I've seen release all water from gates at the bottom of the dam. That's where the most pressure is, and that's where the turbines are. During major releases for flood control (a lot of rain being released as fast as possible without flooding) the dams are flushed to the floor.

The main dams on the Columbia River in the US just turned 50 years old and are still going strong, evening out water flow, providing lakes and irrigation, generating electricity and controlling flooding. I've never heard of any silt problems with a proper design.

Now, if it is just an irrigation dam and all water flows over the top, it can for sure silt up. If there are no gates at the bottom to open and flush them then yes, it's a problem. I do know of a couple of smaller dams, built by irrigation districts which have that problem. Lesson learned.

[DeepInTheForest]

Dams, like a lot of things, have a life expectancy. Eventually, they fill with silt.

That's news to me. The major dams I've seen release all water from gates at the bottom of the dam. That's where the most pressure is, and that's where the turbines are. During major releases for flood control (a lot of rain being released as fast as possible without flooding) the dams are flushed to the floor.

The main dams on the Columbia River in the US just turned 50 years old and are still going strong, evening out water flow, providing lakes and irrigation, generating electricity and controlling flooding. I've never heard of any silt problems with a proper design.

Now, if it is just an irrigation dam and all water flows over the top, it can for sure silt up. If there are no gates at the bottom to open and flush them then yes, it's a problem. I do know of a couple of smaller dams, built by irrigation districts which have that problem. Lesson learned.

TV posters can at times inhabit an alternate universe where facts are not the product of observation or research but rather invented to suit arguments. I envy this happy ability, but I prefer a more grounded reality.

"No silt problems on the Columbia with a proper design", huh? Well, if you define "proper design" as one without silt problems, then I suppose that's certainly true.

From the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study:

• Before dams were constructed, sand moved freely

  Before dams were built on the Columbia River, floods carried sand to the delta, where it gathered in shoals.

  Longshore currents picked up the sand from the shoals, moved it along shore,

  and deposited it on beaches.

  The Columbia River carried about 12 million cubic yards of sediment to the coast per year.

• Dams have restricted the flow of sand by two-thirds

  Beginning in the 1930's, dams were constructed over most of the U.S.

  part of the Columbia River. Dams restricted sediment supply from 90

  percent of the watershed, a quarter of a million square miles. As a

  result, the Columbia River delta has been starved of critical beach

  building sand.

• Delayed effects

  Peacock Spit, a huge shoal north of the mouth of the Columbia, supplied

  sand to coastal beaches for decades. Peacock Spit is now gone. The spit

  may have been scoured away by jetty-influenced currents. With sand in short supply, Washington's southwest coast may be entering a long-term period of erosion.

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/coast/erosion/dams.html

http://coastalmanagement.noaa.gov/news/archivedmtgdocs/DaleBlanton.pdf

[maidu]

^^Potosi

Why has nuclear become so expensive? The normal trend is that technologies become cheaper as they mature.

Is it something to do with extra safety requirements nowadays or does the price include the cost of decommissioning old plants, or has the price of uranium gone up? Or a combination?

Other contenders: Responsibly dealing with N waste, insurance costs, and the near-bottomless costs for dealing with disasters. Though there are few alarming breaches (thus far, just Chernobyl and Fukushima), their effects are monstrous and last for decades.

The #1 best energy policy item is conservation. Thailand, among others, needs to do a whole lot more - to develop public awareness of conserving/lessening electricity usage.

[folium]

Dams, like a lot of things, have a life expectancy. Eventually, they fill with silt.

That's news to me. The major dams I've seen release all water from gates at the bottom of the dam. That's where the most pressure is, and that's where the turbines are. During major releases for flood control (a lot of rain being released as fast as possible without flooding) the dams are flushed to the floor.

The main dams on the Columbia River in the US just turned 50 years old and are still going strong, evening out water flow, providing lakes and irrigation, generating electricity and controlling flooding. I've never heard of any silt problems with a proper design.

Now, if it is just an irrigation dam and all water flows over the top, it can for sure silt up. If there are no gates at the bottom to open and flush them then yes, it's a problem. I do know of a couple of smaller dams, built by irrigation districts which have that problem. Lesson learned.

TV posters can at times inhabit an alternate universe where facts are not the product of observation or research but rather invented to suit arguments. I envy this happy ability, but I prefer a more grounded reality.

"No silt problems on the Columbia with a proper design", huh? Well, if you define "proper design" as one without silt problems, then I suppose that's certainly true.

From the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study:

• Before dams were constructed, sand moved freely

  Before dams were built on the Columbia River, floods carried sand to the delta, where it gathered in shoals.

  Longshore currents picked up the sand from the shoals, moved it along shore,

  and deposited it on beaches.

  The Columbia River carried about 12 million cubic yards of sediment to the coast per year.

• Dams have restricted the flow of sand by two-thirds

  Beginning in the 1930's, dams were constructed over most of the U.S.

  part of the Columbia River. Dams restricted sediment supply from 90

  percent of the watershed, a quarter of a million square miles. As a

  result, the Columbia River delta has been starved of critical beach

  building sand.

• Delayed effects

  Peacock Spit, a huge shoal north of the mouth of the Columbia, supplied

  sand to coastal beaches for decades. Peacock Spit is now gone. The spit

  may have been scoured away by jetty-influenced currents. With sand in short supply, Washington's southwest coast may be entering a long-term period of erosion.

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/coast/erosion/dams.html

http://coastalmanagement.noaa.gov/news/archivedmtgdocs/DaleBlanton.pdf

Or check out the impact of the Akosombo dam in Ghana on the west African coastline in terms of sediment flows.

[NeverSure]

Dams, like a lot of things, have a life expectancy. Eventually, they fill with silt.

That's news to me. The major dams I've seen release all water from gates at the bottom of the dam. That's where the most pressure is, and that's where the turbines are. During major releases for flood control (a lot of rain being released as fast as possible without flooding) the dams are flushed to the floor.

The main dams on the Columbia River in the US just turned 50 years old and are still going strong, evening out water flow, providing lakes and irrigation, generating electricity and controlling flooding. I've never heard of any silt problems with a proper design.

Now, if it is just an irrigation dam and all water flows over the top, it can for sure silt up. If there are no gates at the bottom to open and flush them then yes, it's a problem. I do know of a couple of smaller dams, built by irrigation districts which have that problem. Lesson learned.

TV posters can at times inhabit an alternate universe where facts are not the product of observation or research but rather invented to suit arguments. I envy this happy ability, but I prefer a more grounded reality.

"No silt problems on the Columbia with a proper design", huh? Well, if you define "proper design" as one without silt problems, then I suppose that's certainly true.

From the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study:

• Before dams were constructed, sand moved freely

  Before dams were built on the Columbia River, floods carried sand to the delta, where it gathered in shoals.

  Longshore currents picked up the sand from the shoals, moved it along shore,

  and deposited it on beaches.

  The Columbia River carried about 12 million cubic yards of sediment to the coast per year.

• Dams have restricted the flow of sand by two-thirds

  Beginning in the 1930's, dams were constructed over most of the U.S.

  part of the Columbia River. Dams restricted sediment supply from 90

  percent of the watershed, a quarter of a million square miles. As a

  result, the Columbia River delta has been starved of critical beach

  building sand.

• Delayed effects

  Peacock Spit, a huge shoal north of the mouth of the Columbia, supplied

  sand to coastal beaches for decades. Peacock Spit is now gone. The spit

  may have been scoured away by jetty-influenced currents. With sand in short supply, Washington's southwest coast may be entering a long-term period of erosion.

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/coast/erosion/dams.html

http://coastalmanagement.noaa.gov/news/archivedmtgdocs/DaleBlanton.pdf

Try to keep up. The conversation was about dams filling up with silt, not the carrying of sand in the river bottom to the ocean.

You get sand, which is very heavy small rocks, carried to the ocean during flooding. If you want floods again, you can have sand. The dams release water in a steady fashion.

Also, no one has proven that the dams cause any such thing. It's someone's conjecture. The sand isn't trapped behind the dams.

There are some people that wouldn't be happy no matter how electricity was generated. I guess they'd like to live in the dark, and take us back to the stone age with them? No coal even though it's known how to make it clean, no nukes, no dams. No computers and darkness. Nice.

The first things people ask about a place to live in Thailand is how is the internet speed and the power outage situation.

Edited March 24, 2013 by NeverSure

[RickBradford]

I guess they'd like to live in the dark, and take us back to the stone age with them? No coal even though it's known how to make it clean, no nukes, no dams. No computers and darkness. Nice.

This is precisely the thinking behind the absurd Earth Hour, which was a big splash a few years back, but is now increasingly ignored by the media. It's coming round again soon, and will give Greens their chance to celebrate ignorance, poverty and backwardness.

I mean, why struggle to solve real problems and work to understand how things really work, when you can make yourself feel morally superior with an empty and meaningless gesture? Shall we try to figure out the environmental problems of damming rivers, or sit in the dark for an hour feeling noble?

I saw a clip of one eco-fanatic claiming that 'Earth Hour' "raises awareness" of climate issues. Raises awareness? After 25 years of non-stop bombardment in the media about climate catastrophes which are going to happen next week, they still think they need to "raise awareness"?

Conservation of energy (whether it comes from dams or other sources) is surely a good thing -- the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time does nothing to promote it.

[Credo]

I am all for green technology and everyone saving a lot of energy--except for me, of course. I shouldn't have to change my lifestyle, should I?

[Potosi]

^^Potosi

Why has nuclear become so expensive? The normal trend is that technologies become cheaper as they mature.

Is it something to do with extra safety requirements nowadays or does the price include the cost of decommissioning old plants, or has the price of uranium gone up? Or a combination?

Other contenders: Responsibly dealing with N waste, insurance costs, and the near-bottomless costs for dealing with disasters. Though there are few alarming breaches (thus far, just Chernobyl and Fukushima), their effects are monstrous and last for decades.

There was a third one almost as serious as Chernobyl and Fukushima. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

Note the last sentence of the page "...the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident since 1959, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry."

[DeepInTheForest]

Dams, like a lot of things, have a life expectancy. Eventually, they fill with silt.

That's news to me. The major dams I've seen release all water from gates at the bottom of the dam. That's where the most pressure is, and that's where the turbines are. During major releases for flood control (a lot of rain being released as fast as possible without flooding) the dams are flushed to the floor.

The main dams on the Columbia River in the US just turned 50 years old and are still going strong, evening out water flow, providing lakes and irrigation, generating electricity and controlling flooding. I've never heard of any silt problems with a proper design.

Now, if it is just an irrigation dam and all water flows over the top, it can for sure silt up. If there are no gates at the bottom to open and flush them then yes, it's a problem. I do know of a couple of smaller dams, built by irrigation districts which have that problem. Lesson learned.

TV posters can at times inhabit an alternate universe where facts are not the product of observation or research but rather invented to suit arguments. I envy this happy ability, but I prefer a more grounded reality.

"No silt problems on the Columbia with a proper design", huh? Well, if you define "proper design" as one without silt problems, then I suppose that's certainly true.

From the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study:

• Before dams were constructed, sand moved freely

  Before dams were built on the Columbia River, floods carried sand to the delta, where it gathered in shoals.

  Longshore currents picked up the sand from the shoals, moved it along shore,

  and deposited it on beaches.

  The Columbia River carried about 12 million cubic yards of sediment to the coast per year.

• Dams have restricted the flow of sand by two-thirds

  Beginning in the 1930's, dams were constructed over most of the U.S.

  part of the Columbia River. Dams restricted sediment supply from 90

  percent of the watershed, a quarter of a million square miles. As a

  result, the Columbia River delta has been starved of critical beach

  building sand.

• Delayed effects

  Peacock Spit, a huge shoal north of the mouth of the Columbia, supplied

  sand to coastal beaches for decades. Peacock Spit is now gone. The spit

  may have been scoured away by jetty-influenced currents. With sand in short supply, Washington's southwest coast may be entering a long-term period of erosion.

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/coast/erosion/dams.html

http://coastalmanagement.noaa.gov/news/archivedmtgdocs/DaleBlanton.pdf

Try to keep up. The conversation was about dams filling up with silt, not the carrying of sand in the river bottom to the ocean.

You get sand, which is very heavy small rocks, carried to the ocean during flooding. If you want floods again, you can have sand. The dams release water in a steady fashion.

Also, no one has proven that the dams cause any such thing. It's someone's conjecture. The sand isn't trapped behind the dams.

There are some people that wouldn't be happy no matter how electricity was generated. I guess they'd like to live in the dark, and take us back to the stone age with them? No coal even though it's known how to make it clean, no nukes, no dams. No computers and darkness. Nice.

The first things people ask about a place to live in Thailand is how is the internet speed and the power outage situation.

"Try to keep up.The conversation was about dams filling up with silt, not the carrying

of sand in the river bottom to the ocean.You get sand, which is very heavy small rocks, carried to the ocean during flooding. If you want floods again, you can have sand. The dams release water in a steady fashion.

"Also, no one has proven that the dams cause any such thing. It's someone's conjecture. The sand isn't trapped behind the dams."

Cannot stop laughing. Please continue to post; you are the worst enemy of your own position. Someone's conjecture? These publications are from government geologists and ecologists. Sand is sediment, or a component of it. The sand isn't trapped behind the dams? Then where is it hiding? For those who can read and process new information, once again, from the state of Washington's Department of Ecology:

Dams have restricted the flow of sand by two-thirds

Beginning in the 1930's, dams were constructed over most of the U.S.

part of the Columbia River. Dams restricted sediment supply from 90

percent of the watershed, a quarter of a million square miles.

That seems pretty clear to me-- the dams are trapping sediment that would otherwise wind up replenishing the coast of Washington, and as a consequence the state is losing shoreline.

About sediment in dam reservoirs, from a United States Geological Survey (USGS) publication: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3056/pdf/fs20103056.pdf

Lake Roosevelt (Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake) is the impoundment of the upper Columbia River behind Grand Coulee Dam, and is the largest reservoir within the Bureau of Reclamation’s Columbia Basin Project (CBP). The reservoir is located in northeastern Washington,and stretches 151 miles from Grand Coulee Dam north to the Canadian border. The 15–20 miles of the Columbia River downstream of the border are riverine and are under small backwater effects from the dam. Grand Coulee Dam is located on the mainstem of the Columbia River about 90

miles northwest of Spokane.

Since the late 1980s, trace-element contamination has been known to be widely present in Lake Roosevelt. Trace elements of concern include arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc. Contaminated sediment carried by the Columbia River is the primary source of the widespread occurrence of trace-element enrichment present in Lake Roosevelt.

So in other words, the sediment is carried by the river to the reservoir, where it falls to

the bottom of Lake Roosevelt and is trapped behind the dam. The sediments contain toxic minerals, a situation which is the focus of this USGS publication. This is a story common to all dams, which is of

particular concern in China because of the large amounts of pollutant-generating industry there, and the use of the river by people downstream for drinking water.

The USGS publication goes on to say:

A study by the USGS in 1992 (Bortleson and others, 2001) was the first integrated

approach to study metals and chlorinated hydrocarbons in the reservoir sediments, and serves as a

benchmark for later studies. Recent studies have focused on metals contamination in water, sediment, fish, and air. The primary metals of interest are arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc, all of which are present to some degree in the discharges from the Teck smelter.

Majewski and others (2003) found elevated concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, copper, mercury, lead, and zinc in shallow, nearshore sediments along the reservoir. Concentrations for most metals decreased down-reservoir . These results are typical of other sediment studies of Lake Roosevelt, including an EPA Site Investigation conducted in 2002.

In 2002, the USGS collected sediment cores from six locations in the mid-channel of Lake Roosevelt that showed that the largest metals concentrations were deeper within the accumulated sediments; or, conversely, lower concentrations of most metals were in the more recent deposits (Cox and others, 2005; fig. 7). This pattern reflects decreases over time in metals discharges from the Teck smelter. Concentrations in several cores show sections of low concentrations believed to be associated with landslide deposits and(or) bank erosion. These deposits interrupt and mix with regular fluvial sedimentary deposition processes. The landslides also are believed to have been a significant source of sediment to the reservoir. Cox and others (2005) also showed that slag within the reservoir sediment is not as chemically stable as reported for recently-created slag.

So not only is there considerable sedimentation behind the Grand Coulee dam, it is of sufficient concern for its toxic content to merit attention from the USGS.

In this part of the world, incidentally-- which NeverSure brought up, not me-- dams are being removed, because they are not thought to be productive in a cost-benefits analysis sense. When they are decommissioned, one of the concerns is the stored sediment behind the dams.

From an Associated Press article:

In a statement, Virgil Lewis of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council called the announcement of the dam’s decommissioning “a momentous and long-awaited day.”

“This is an essential step in restoring the ecosystem’s resources and rebuilding the natural balance that supported

the Yakama people and a significant tribal fishery for millennia,” Lewis said.

Prior to breaching, workers will dynamite a 12-foot by 18-foot tunnel through 80 feet of the dam’s 90-foot-thick base. On demolition day, they’ll blast through the final 10 feet. The impounded waters of Northwestern Lake behind the dam will flow through the tunnel at an initial rate of 10,000 cubic feet per second. “It will be a controlled high-water event,” Gauntt said. “The flow that will be coming down will be more than what normally comes down, but it won’t cause any flooding.”

The 92-acre reservoir is expected to empty in about six hours while some 2.3 million cubic yards of sediment built up over nearly a century will be flushed downstream, killing virtually all life in the lower 3.3 miles of the river. The sediment will enter the Columbia River, which will carry it downstream all the way to

Bonneville Dam. [where it will once again be trapped!!]

http://m.spokesman.com/stories/2011/jun/14/dam/

Edited March 24, 2013 by DeepInTheForest