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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

Hydro power is not green. It may be clean, by some definitions of clean, but it has a huge ecological footprint.

The impact is harder to quantify than with other forms of power and is ignored due to that.

Now, I'm not advocating against all hydro power, I think it's especially important in a pumped storage/peaking capacity.

The projects definitely need to be analyzed on a cost/benefit analysis and as this points out, 3.5MW of power is just trivial and not worth it.

As an aside, there are a number of dam removal videos on YouTube which are fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yM5m5-1-I0

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We've also gotten as species rather better at understanding downstream repercussions in terms of erosion control and hatchery/vegetation safety since early 19th/20th century dams, such as Edwards.

It's not entirely an either/or situation, and there are interesting, growing workarounds such as hatchery creeks and salmon cannons. But yes, building new hydro power should always have a strong ecological assessment done before proceeding, and taking the trade-offs into account.

(Disclaimer: I've been working on stream restoration software, but am not a domain expert, don't speak for my employer, and mostly am only commenting because I find it really interesting stuff because I've been working adjacent to it and hearing cool stories about it. Always fun when it comes up on the HN front page.)

What’s the software?

RIVERMorph http://www.rivermorph.com/

The problem with this line of reasoning is that no energy is green by these standards. The solar panel supply chain is not green, solar and wind farms kill birds, dams destroy habitat, nuclear produces waste... if you think any of those things are trivial, just google them and you’ll find plenty of people lobbying against them.

If you accept that human are a part of the environment, and that we are going to have some level of impact on it, then as you said, you can look at the RoI/impact of decisions and their alternatives, and come a conclusion that reduces impact. But if your standard is green/not green, then you’re never going to be able to solve any problems.

They are doing exactly what you are saying though. The point is that the ratio of damage to power for a dam that produces so little power is too high.

Absolutely, I think this instance is perfectly reasonable. But then you also have people demanding that something be done about birds dying over solar farms (the only thing that could be done about that is to shut down the plant).

That’s why I think the “it’s not green” assessment is never productive. “It’s more green than other things” is reasonable and productive, but “it’s not green enough” is an endless rabbit hole.

I mean isn't the logical route to evaluate everything in terms of measurable ecological and climate damage to power produced and try to minimize?

It would be. But the issue is so emotive and political, that in my opinion, I don’t think that actually happens very much.

> no energy is green

This is precisely my point of view.

You must consider the full lifecycle ROI.

I'm a particularly big fan of nuclear for that reason.

We’re in complete agreement on this then. I wish energy policy was subjected to a reasonable RoI analysis more often.

Yep, I think so.

My point is more that supposably "green" solutions are not, and that you have to consider the total lifecycle of things.

Personally, I favor things where the spoilage is contained. Say, nuclear over coal/nat gas because its far far easier to contain the waste byproducts of nuclear than a coal/nat gas plant.

Want to flood an effectively dead desert in the rockies to make gigawatts of power? sounds worth it.

Want to flood a vibrant ecosystem in the PNW or Northeast to make a few megawatts? please don't

How does the nuclear waste being dangerous for between 200 and 15.7 million years[1] factor into the ROI? Not snark, I just can't fathom how to reliably keep something sealed for 15.7 million years, much less the knowledge of what it is or how to handle it if it becomes unsealed. Otherwise, sign me up for atom smashing/fusing.

Does that factor in to your thinking?

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/sherman2/

You’re referencing an undergraduate memo. I’m sure you could find something more authoritative if you want to try and convince people nuclear waste is an insoluble problem.

Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technical one. It’s either still hot and could be used for fuel or not and relatively safe. The hot stuff can be burned in reactors; we don’t because that requires plutonium cycle with the obvious weapons uses. Cold waste can be allowed to decay for a few decades, vitrified by mixing with molten glass so it’s chemically inert and stored in a geologically inactive area, anywhere far from continental plate boundaries deep in the ground[1]. It could also be dumped in deep marine trenches at subduction boundaries where it would eventually be returned to the earth’s core. If you want to get it off Earth altogether I’m sure we could get it to the moon if we really wanted.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

Handling nuclear waste should factor into the ROI however the costs are relatively minimal. Nuclear waste does not remain dangerous for that long. The numbers you're misquoting (its 220k years not 200m years) from that bad source are for the half life of particular elements. It does not address the safety of these particular elements, nor does it discuss what particular fuel cycles produce those or at what concentrations.

Nuclear waste only remains seriously dangerous for "a few" decades after which it can be inertly stored indefinitely at minimal expense.

This is also assuming that we're not talking about any new/exotic fuel cycles, but, only with fuel cycles that were proven working 30+ years ago. If you want to discuss exotic fuel cycles things can be even better, though the science is less firm with less data on them (for now).

Modern wind has basically no impact on birds. It is several orders of magnitude less bird-hungry than are American domesticated cats.

There are plenty of dams, such as run-of-river dams and specific locations with no fauna, where they do not have a significant negative environmental impact, and may create new habitat where previously there was none.

My community is currently trying to remove its run of river dam. It has mostly come down to removal is cheaper than maintenance. There is added benefits of one less portage and I am not convinced of the upstream habitat argument. It is mostly a stagnant dead zone for most of the summer.

Fun trivia fact: Ranulph Fiennes was thrown out of the SAS for blowing up a dam that offended him using "spare" explosives from training exercises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes#Officer

People need to keep this kind of thing in mind when major energy policy proposals like the Green New Deal rely on studies by the likes of M. Jacobsen (the guy who sued his scientific critics), whose 100% renewable scenarios all rely on at least 10x expansion of hydro power in the USA.

TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I served on an endorsement committee. We made recommendations (or note) to the membership to support candidates, initiatives, referendum, etc.

The last big internal food fight was over a levy to renew K-12 school funding. These are usually narrowly won ballot measures. Because some people think taxes is theft, government is evil, yadda yadda. This time something like $100m / year was at stake.

Three board members strenuously argued against endorsement. They are local leaders in education policy. Our usual "go to" experts. Committed, knowledgeable, experienced, in the fight. The biggest education boosters you can imagine.

The sticking point was ~$55k / year that could potentially be used by charter schools. For something like vans to transport kids to after school care. I don't remember the exact details, but you get the gist.

I had no idea who Mark Jacobsen is. Okay, he's an influential expert. Being called to task for a report first written in 2009. His cohort is in a pissing match with another led by Ken Caldeira. Some fun.

Going out on a limb here: There will be no new dam construction in North America in my life time. Like our current nuclear tech, the (financial) costs are too high, and the timelines are too long. (Wikipedia says we could maybe add power generation to existing unpowered dams, which could be cool.)

New Green Deal, or something like it, has to happen. Spoiler alert: You're not going to like most of it.

Focus on the positive. Please.

If you have to trade support for building some dams (that will never happen) in order to get the programs you support, please just do it.

I'm a pragmatist. I like plans that make sense. Wishful thinking based on impossible plans is not a useful path forward. Understanding trade-offs and making them is productive and useful. Discussing facts is an important step in this process. To decarbonize at scale we need large scale new installations of dams, nukes, wind, solar, and geothermal. Spoiler alert: many will protest against all of these for a wide variety of reasons. Still, we must find a way to proceed with low carbon energy.

We don't have the luxury of choosing which low carbon energy we like best. We need it all. For greens, start liking nukes more. For conservatives, start liking wind and solar more.

Liking nukes falls into the same category as liking dams: I want to believe they aren’t going to happen because they are economically infeasible. The same money would buy significantly more capacity in wind/solar/storage.

The sticking point with dams and nukes is the same thing: the sheer cost of finding a suitable location, preparing the site, then pouring thousands of tons of concrete (and that has to be exactly the right concrete with no shortcuts).

So yeah, I will happily support policy which includes considering nukes when it also includes considerations that I am interested in, but I am not supporting any subsidies for nukes and dams when that money is far better spent elsewhere.

The catch there is that the folks that want the nukes and dams will get my support in principle, then trade someone else’s support for subsidising nukes and dams for support of legislation around guns for teachers or “religious freedom” (aka the right to discriminate based on race or religion) or something else I loathe.

So the nukes and dams people get their nukes and dams by spending all the money that could have gone to cheaper power, and we get extremely regressive social policy to boot.

So given the horse trading that goes on, I can not support dams and nukes for any reason, because even though I believe they are economically infeasible the people that want to build them will trade away things that I consider more valuable than money.

For the nukes and dams people, it is far more important to funnel government funds into their (friends’) companies. Nothing else matters: climate change, social well-being, healthy economy … they just don’t care.

Check out the Trump administration in the USA with their continual whittling of environmental protection in favour of fossil fuels, or the Morrison government in Australia with water rights rorting.

There is simply no room for negotiating with these people because they are not rational actors.

Those are some pretty massive generalizations that fall apart immediately compared with my experiences.

Tell us about your experiences with conservative politics participating in the emancipation of women and minorities, and protecting the environment from industrial plunder.

In my country we have health minister claiming abortion is “the easy way out” for example, and conservative politics telling us that homosexuality is one step removed from bestiality, and allowing same sex marriage will result in people marrying their pets.

At least we aren’t yet at the stage of charging a woman with murder because she failed to avoid being shot in the stomach thus losing her baby.

But we are in the process of building an irrigation pipeline so that cotton and rice farmers in the desert can take all the water from less arid farmlands, and kill a thousand kilometres of river.

Now I can't tell if you're pro or con hydro. Or if you're game for quid pro quo in the name of expediency, or will insist on everything making sense (to you).

I'm pro hydro to a point that is less than a 10x expansion. To reach the rest of the low carbon needs I expect a combo of 24/7 low-footprint nukes plus massive electrification plus massive increases of wind and solar to the point that all of the above are pressured by NIMBY hard.

Absolutely fair.

It's hard to argue that we shouldn't have done any of the big dams out west. But there's at least a good argument against the Glen Canyon. And, especially with the benefit of hindsight, the seriously proposed dam sites in the Grand Canyon would have been very not good.

In the east the proposed Tocks Island Dam was pursued for a long time. Again, especially with the benefit of hindsight, this was also pretty clearly not good.

No dam at Boulder City in Nevada and the Los Angeles basin becomes a very different story in terms of habitability. The town of St. Thomas would rise again and we’d find that missing B-29 that ditched into what is currently the very artificial Lake Mead. The Colorado River would regain its natural flow.

Silicon Valley would die, though. Where on earth does its water come from? Yes, 85% of the water from Lake Mead. The Los Angeles basin is built up far beyond its natural sustainable water capacity. Unless there is a great leap forward in desalination technology some dams remain a rather necessary evil.

Silicon Valley gets no water from the Colorado River?

No it does not

Confirming that chrisdhoover is correct, and none of the Bay Area uses water from the Colorado River: https://www.kqed.org/science/14623/bay-area-do-you-know-wher...

Are you confusing Silicon Valley with Los Angeles? Silicon Valley is near San Francisco, not LA, so it gets its water from Hetch Hetchy and the delta like other bay area cities. [1]

[1] https://www.zone7water.com/images/pdf_docs/waterways/waterwa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#/media/Fil...

Leaving aside your geographic confusion, you're wrong about how water is used. Silicon Valley has a tiny water demand per dollar of output; they could even afford desalinization if needed. The industry that would die would be farming.

If farming died, so would we. I'm not sure how the dollar value of software would hold any relevance at that point.

This is, of course, snark - but a lot of people fail to realize that agriculture is incredibly undervalue, for how important it is to society.

The farming that would die is the very heavily subsidized business of essentially exporting California water. It's not like Californians will starve if we lose our cotton industry or if we don't have alfalfa to export to foreign dairies.

Not at all. We’d just grow vegetables in the Northeast where’s there’s water. We would be screwed with unaffordable nuts and citrus though.

Unfortunately it’s too late for New Jersey and most of the mid-Atlantic.

The LA basin supports over 10 million people. Cut its water supply and the missing water has to be made up somewhere. I know full well it LA is 6 hours away from Silicon Valley but make LA run dry on water and CA-wide water restrictions would only get harsher. Remember that Silicon Valley still has a human population to support, too.

Desalination has been the technological breakthrough of next Tuesday for most of my life. I’ll be happy to see an actual deployment. Until then we wait.

Isn't desalination widely used in the Middle East?

Yes; it's very cheap.

It produces some pretty nasty byproducts, so a tough sell in California, but affordability is a total non-issue.

City-scale desalination is something you can currently cut a cheque and build, if you want. Both the capital and operating costs are high, though.

eg. https://www.melbournewater.com.au/water/securing-our-water-s...

Not sure where you're getting your misinformation, but LA uses less water than the farms of the Central Valley or Southern California.

Cut the water supply and LA will do fine, but the farms will die. (Millions of voters vs. a handful of relatively minor donors. It's an easy decision.)

Only those crops that use a ridiculous amount of subsidized water, like cotton and almonds. Read "Cadillac Desert".

An opinionated, yet very educational documentary on the subject being Damnation: http://damnationfilm.com/

Interesting, thank you!

A good, fictional account of blowing up a dam (that's not The Monkey Wrench Gang) is Night Moves. One of the eco-warriors was critiqued by his boss at an organic farm (before he put 2 and 2 together...) that taking down one damn isn't enough - there were 10 more dams on that same river.

I guess it's also sobering to think that most all major rivers in the USA are damned up. I think, without looking, save the Yellowstone River.

That's it.

By your definition simply existing is not green. It's not a matter of absolutes, but degrees. Between green and fossil fuels, even account for construction, the damn is "greener" in all scenarios I can think of off the top of my head.

You can't compare apples to apples but dams that have big negative ecological effects and don't actually produce much power would seem to be net negatives from an overall "green" perspective. There are also other effects including flood control, recreation, effect on local communities, water supply, etc. that can go in plus and minus columns but dams are absolutely not always net positives.

Sure, I'm not saying damns have no consequences. I'm saying that it's silly to declare them "not green" because of the existence of environmental consequences because there are consequences to everything we do.

Damns are not a perfect solution, but compared to the ecological costs of coal mining, gas extraction, and burning of Fossil fuels, I feel it's disingenuous to just dismiss them out of hand for not being "green".

The comment wasn’t declaring them to be “not-green” because of the mere existence of environmental consequences. It was doing so because of the large magnitude of those consequences.

There’s probably a good argument to be made that they’re worth it, but the original statement was fine too.

"Not green by default" might have been a better phrasing? They can still be much more green compared to alternatives. "Green" isn't a binary, and that seems to be the crux of both arguments above.

> large magnitude

Large magnitude in proportion to small return.

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