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Comment by rbritton | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Last I heard, Washington state does not consider hydro to be renewable [0]. I don't know if any other states are similar.

[0]: https://shiftwa.org/its-time-wa-considers-hydropower-as-rene...

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It shouldn't - the damage dams do to our fisheries is devastating. We likely wouldn't need fish farms and genetic modified salmon if we didn't have so many dams.

It would be interesting to see what effects the New Deal had on our fish populations... https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-categories/infrastructure...

I would consider them renewable as long as the river keeps flowing. The question of whether or not we should use them because of the damage to fish populations is another question entirely.

Not just the fish are impacted by the dams https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2018/11/feds-approve-plan-fo...

> The state applied to kill the sea lions “because their analyses showed that the high levels of predation by sea lions meant there was an almost 90% probability that one of the upper Willamette steelhead runs would go extinct,” the wildlife agency said in a statement.

Not to mention the cascading downstream (no pun intended) effects like Orcas starving to death.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/hunger...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/orca-sta...

Renewable is immaterial as long as it doesn't emit CO2.

Nuclear isn't renewable, either.

Nuclear doesn't ravage fish and watersheds either!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hanford+leaking+into+columbia

Hanford isn't a power plant, it was a nuclear production facility for weapons grade nuclear material.

"The last reactor, N Reactor, continued to operate as a dual-purpose reactor, being both a power reactor used to feed the civilian electrical grid via the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS)"

"Hanford also hosts a commercial nuclear power plant, the Columbia Generating Station, and various centers for scientific research and development, such as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the LIGO Hanford Observatory. "

Nuclear has well known downsides. As I mentioned, it's not renewable so isn't a permanent path forward for human civilization. But additionally it currently has unpriced externalities in long term waste storage, looks less attractive when fuel & plant are full amortized over lifecycle, complex relationship with arms proliferation, limited deployment options because of large cooling requirements, requires permanent and expensive security and expertise over the life of a plant, and others.

It's not the harmless cure-all that it's made out to be here at times.

edit: that said, CO2 levels are an immediate planetary crisis and nuclear is a tool we can and should use to mitigate it.

Nuclear isn't renewable precisely, but the amount of fuel available is extremely large and not being decreased by any appreciable amount.

Waste storage can be handled quite easily by reprocessing fuel, the waste is very small in comparison to other types of energy. There's little to no relationship to arms proliferation, that's only a very specific type of reactor and fuel that's not in general use for nuclear power.

And finally there's a lot of water on the planet. Cooling isn't a difficult problem.

The bigger problem is that reactor research has essentially been stopped due to nimby problems, so we don't even know how much better we could make nuclear power.

I think I'm missing some sarcasm here. Nuclear power plants need water for cooling. If a fish gets stuck in the cooling system then it gets ravaged. The hot water gets dumped back into the river. If the water gets too hot then everything that lives inside the river dies.

Pumped hydro actually emits significant levels of greenhouse gases (methane rather than CO2, though).

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...

All hydro does, I don't know about the effect per kWH generated vs other fuel sources, though.

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