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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Said as someone who lives in a hydro power province. Hydro is incredible harmful. It ruins whole ecosystems in ways that an oil spill never could.

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Somewhat true, but it doesn't harm the environment from the same angle. The #1 enemy right now is greenhouse gases, and you can't deny that hydro power produces much less of it than coal.

You're right that there's a real impact on ecosystems; flooding large areas and such. However, I'd describe it more as a disruption than a destruction; 30 years later the ecosystems around it have adapted and the reservoir serves the ecological function of a large lake. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's better than burning coal.

except not. WAC Bennett dam in BC was built more than 30 years ago, and you still can't eat fish from the area for miles and miles around, including feeder streams and streams downstream because of methyl mercury issues. The dams in the Pac-Northwest are a major reason for the collapse of the salmon fisheries which absolutely has a huge impact on all wildlife in the area, and trees and plants too. Everything up and down stream.

> and you can't deny that hydro power produces much less of it than coal.

I can't vouch for this but I read stuff like this

https://news.wsu.edu/2016/09/28/reservoirs-play-substantial-...

td;dr: Bacteria in reservoirs decompose organic material trapped behind the dam releasing CO2 and methane.

Ok, but the link doesn't seem to say what would happen to that organic material if it weren't trapped behind the dam. Wouldn't it decompose anyway? (or get turned into fish, but I would expect that to happen either way)

generally organic material in a forest doesn't get decomposed into methane.

That is hilariously wrong. There’s no “right” way for an ecosystem to be. A hydro dam changes the landscape and the ecosystem re-adapts. Natural dams form all the time in nature as well, should we go around breaking these up to “save” the ecosystem?

Well no, building a dam fully destroys a valley's ecosystem. A point of comparison: Chernobyl also has a new ecosystem around it, where re-adaptation has occurred. We know the radioactivity is too high around it for a 21st century's human lifespan of ~80 years. Boars and birds are having a ball. Does it not follow that your accepting the environmental damage from a dam means also that you accept the environmental damage from an early generation fission clusterfuck?

Some of the dams affect a wider area than the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Ok, does that mean that we should drain the Great Lakes so we can "restore" them as valleys with their own ecosystem? (supposing that we could make them off limits to building, so Chicago and Gary and other cities on what are now lakes couldn't encroach; and never mind that we don't know what they were like before the glaciers carved them out, or if they were even valleys back then) Would that be better in some objective way?

Like turn the area around the former Aral Sea into a desert?

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