The largest dam-removal in US history

Lots of dams are flood control projects that also produce electricity.

Indeed. This is why hydro shouldn't be considered green energy. (That, and the methane reduced when hundreds or thousands of hectares of living, breathing land are flooded and decompose in an anoxic environment.)

You are comparing the power output of a damn that displaced some fish to one that displaced tens of millions?

Doesn’t seem very proportional

The article made it sound like they would lose less than 8% of their 2200 MW renewable generation for a reduction of less than 176 MW. Maybe the article confused the total generation from the 8 plants with and the 4 being removed.

They estimated 450 million to add fish ladders and rehabilitate the facilities for the next 100 years. If it was $450 million for 170 MW $2.6 million / MW is pretty cheap construction cost. I am surprised that it isn’t an attractive investment

> three gorges produces 22,500 MW of power.

Correction: 22,500MW is the installed capacity, i.e. what the generators are capable of. It only reaches about half capacity on average, going by the numbers listed in the Wikipedia article (101.6TWh in 2018 => average ~11,600MW).

The problems is they aren't building any power to deal with the decrease and no one is building nuke plants that haven't been in the works for 15+ years. I all for this if they want their rivers back though, but we can act like there won't be consequences.

Well said. To paraphrase Wade Davis, the question is not hydro or no hydro but where, how much and for whose benefit. Many dams produce very little electricity and can be removed with minimal impact to the cost or carbon intensity of our power supply.

We should not conflate dams that are integral to the power system like Grand Coulee with those that are insignificant.

> Common designs for self-contained PORTABLE nuclear reactors easily outclass the entire generating capacity of these dams.

None of these designs has been turned to production yet, and no one has solved the waste storage question.

Nameplate capacity (power, in MW) isn't the only consideration in electrical generation, but total generation (energy, in MWh), dispatchability, cold-start capability, pollution, other impacts, maintenance, storage, accident risk, waste storage, and other factors.

Even smaller hydro sites are valuable in that they represent very raapidly dispatchable load --- a dam's turbines can be put online or taken offline in seconds to minutes, where other sources (notably conventional and nuclear thermal power) require hours to days to make large cycling changes.

Solar and wind rely on incident available energy, and are not deployable at operator discretion, though balancing over the grid or via storage, or dispachable load, may be possible.

Hydro banks power in the form of impounded water. And with relatively simple moddifications offers 90%+ efficient pumped hydro storage capabilities.

The downsides are the large ecological impacts noted in the BBC article, sedimentation (a particularly large problem on the silt-heavy Colorado River), as well as some risk of structural failure, though the US record on this is generally quite good.

With many thousands of dams, there've been a handful of major failures. Planning, alerts, and response generally eliminate of minimise deaths, though disruption from evacuations, or property damage can still be substantial. Long-term consequences spanning centuries, as with nuclear failures, are not a factor, even in utterly catastrophic failures, largely experienced outside the US.

I'm not defending the Klamath hydro facilities, only noting factors.

Your obsevation that there are both benefits and negative impacts is true of any technology or technological intervention.

Honestly this framing just makes me wonder about what the impacts of three gorges dam has then, or it's risks.

It's more complicated than just finding balance vs. impact on dam power level, it's the other things introduced by human population that isn't aware or engaged with the local ecology.

To ramble aloud, Recently tire dust was linked to salmon getting sick ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/climate/salmon-kill-washi... ), and in talking with people in the northwest home construction around urbanism/single family home suburbs over the past 30 years has hugely impacted the pacific northwest ecology.

> Also, Chinook is delicious and anything which means more lox is a win in my book.

The salmon isn’t for you. It’s for the orcas who are literally starving.

Nearly weekly and sometimes daily outages in Sand City and surrounding areas people actually packing up and leaving and they're still using our tax dollars to tear down infrastructure. My tribe was also in that area still is the fish are fine. Just because this tribe was on the American side of the border when they drew the lines doesn't mean that they are the only tribe that used that area. California has a blanket ban on any nuclear energy projects or research in California it's never going to happen. get ready to buy China coal because that's what you're going to be using in about 6 years.

According to Wikipedia the issue with the Matilija Dam is that there is so much sediment built up behind it that they can't figure out how to remove the dam without causing a disaster.

There are various proposals, but it seems none are good enough.

After about five years of researching UK wildlife/natural areas I have come to the conclusion that the UK should be considered one of the worst examples of how to manage nature.

It is amazing how much Brits insist on destroying their nature rather than working with it, truly a sad thing.

Just look at the total destruction of basically all of the chalk streams, the insane struggle to reintroduce beavers (beavers! Not even that crazy of an animal to bring back), badger culls, grouse moor monocultures for hunting, nearly complete destruction of any native woodland, the list goes on and on and on.

The UK really needs to take a step back and look at what they've done to their nature.