The World’s Aging Dams
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
We figured out how to build dams and then quickly built a ton of them, without the know-how to assess their safety nor decommission them. And since we built dams so quickly, we ran out of new places to dam, so future generations stopped studying dam construction since there was less work to do. Now we have far fewer people than we need to keep what we have safe, and most are about to reach EOL.
This is the downside of geoengineering, or chasing any engineering trend: it's possible to build amazing things, but we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder. Not only is it more challenging work to build things that are sustainable, it's also inherently less flashy than building the next new thing. Meanwhile people begin to rely on these projects and take them for granted. The end result is a ton of risk concentrated on a single point of failure.
Also in the news today is this piece [1] on a deadly flood recently by a dam under construction near the base of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand India. Engineers warned climate change induced glacier melt would cause catastrophic flooding that dams would be unable to withstand, but bureaucrats chose to ignore these warnings.
Basically, don't try to outwit nature.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/world/asia/india-flood-ig...
I think the issue is less the lack of knowledge, and more the lack of political will to meaningfully tackle the problem.
For a commodore user you are very optimistic about things getting better!
More nuclear plants are getting closed than built.
In short: ((by 2035)) nuclear generating capacity ((will be)) 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#History
They, however, built renewables like crazy.
We could fulfill the world's nuclear waste storage needs with a couple landfills if the will was there (though any geologist will tell you are better options than near surface storage).
From an ecological perspective nuclear is the best option by a mile because the amount of stuff you need to pull out of the ground, move around, use and dispose of is so small per energy produced.
Tiny local hydro (with natural dam) is the future, but getting a building permit is near impossible. (I leave it to the reader to guess why)
We need to switch off electricity for everything except (low power) computers and networks. = hand pumped water, wood stove for water heater, earth cellar as fridge!
Mass transports are completely over, grow/breed/preserve your food locally!
Even ignoring the CO2 aspect, the particulate emissions from this would be quite problematic in any sort of dense area. Not to mention what fraction of those particulates would end up inside the house...
Also, you don't mention heating (houses, not water). That is a huge part of energy consumption in many parts of the world.
What has changed such that you could not remake the power grid? Do we lack the raw materials or know how?
People see what a good job you've done getting a dam built or a bridge constructed, they vote for you. People don't vote for you because they didn't suffer the consequences of reduced maintenance. People vote against you if you raise taxes to pay for maintenance or if they're inconvenienced by shutdowns while they repair your dam or bridge.
The problem is systemic.
The work is being done, probably not at a scale or pace big enough to meet the needs of the infrastructure (see: all those old and ailing bridges across the country) but it is being done at some level.
Not sure if this is a good example of "know how to build dams". It's a dam foolish design, built on an earthquake fault zone that's been made unstable by the excavation that's being done to build the dam. The design has been changed to include this ridiculous earthfill section (https://www.sitecproject.com/about-site-c/site-c-project-com...) to compensate for the weirdness of the geography there. It's probably going to fail catastrophically at some point and destroy a lot of homes downstream from it, and the controversy over the project basically caused the downfall of BC's last government.
The true cost will be somewhere around 3x the expected, in the long run. They lied through their teeth to offload the lemon onto the feds.
Huge portions of the Comox Valley and Coquitlam are precarious; a strong shake will send a wave of water that will wipe out thousands of homes.
https://thenarwhal.ca/fracking-induced-earthquakes-buffer-zo...
> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/12/they-are-barb...
A lot of severe stress environmental damage could have been prevented if we had built more nuclear power plants.
Compare that to what are considered massive world news nuclear power plant tragedies like Chernobyl (about 31 direct deaths, long term effects are up for debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...) and Fukushima (1 direct death, low counts of radiation poisoning that can be attributed to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... ).
Not to be pedantic, but...
Neither can many other pollutants, but it can easily be detected, in fact it's probably one of the most easily detected.
If the choice is between environmental damage from fracking or coal mining and deaths from coal pollution or flooding a valley somewhere...
The Guardian kind of forgot to mention these as factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il%C4%B1su_Dam
Citation please; and who is this "we"? Major infrastructure failures are rare and large expensive assets are generally well looked after. This Mullaperiyar dam situation sounds very concerning, but it has failed more slowly than the empire that built it. It wasn't built this century and it wasn't built last century either. It was built the century before that.
It is not obvious why this situation has arisen, but it is pretty much certain that the builders of the dam have no regrets and didn't forget anything. Nor did people around the dam for many generations.
"we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder"
I imagine that part of the problem is that the heavy maintenance for large engineering projects begins years or decades after completion. Upon completion, it's hard to imagine these huge creations falling apart; add to this an element of "this won't be my problem (I won't be here in 50 years)" and you've got a recipe for short-term thinking - especially by those who don't have the expertise (read: the politicians and bureaucrats).
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2015/05/19/americas-infrastructu... [2] John Oliver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8
Nuclear, you can spin down a plant and balance generating capacity elsewhere.
Bridges, you can provide access via detours or ferries.
Almost every other mega-engineering project we have is network related: in that there exists alternate connectivity.
Dams are intrinsically linked to their topography and hydrology. Where can you source replacement water at that volume? Where can you put excess water? They essentially have to be hotfixed in-place, while in operation.
Drain down, dig a bypass, temporary dams inside both sides of the bypass, do the offline / bypassed work, reverse the procedure. Maybe the second time we'll have the foresight to make the bypass more easily serviceable again.
Btw, the time scales are quite long even if it can be done. Filling Lake Mead took from late 1934 to may 1937 or about 2.5 years. Assuming the downstream infrastructure can take double the normal flows, you'd need 2.5 years to drain and another 2.5 years to refill after the maintenance is done. The opportunity costs are huge, it seems at least worthwhile to check if you can do the works underwater with robots or something like that.
Let's not forget why these dams were built -- to control destructive flooding, ensure reliable water for agriculture, and provide electricity to those who didn't have it.
Sustainability at all costs has its own costs: the good which isn't done while waiting for the perfect.
It's hard to tell a family, sitting in the dark, who just lost their crops to flood or drought that they'll have to wait another 40-70 years for renewable power, and just have to deal with intermittent water access.
This!
In my experience, most people agree that ecology is _one of_ the priorities, but people who define themselves as ecologists tend to think to ecology as _the_ priority. In the end, while they think they advocate for a nicer world, they tend to alienate other people from the green path beacuse of their extremism.
The problem is our (as in the human's) environment and not exploiting it to the point where we kill ourselves out of existence. A bit of beer is okay, a lot of beer can cause a nasty hangover, too much beer and you kill yourself.
It wasn't even the primary reason in the modern america nature movement (and by modern I mean starting with the John Muir/Teddy roosevelt era, when some of these large dams started being built).
It was about keeping these places available to be enjoyed by everyone, not exploited for profits and destroyed for the benefit of the few. It's a public good and public resource.
Of course, let's not forget that John Muir was the primary opponent of the O'Shaughnessy Dam (Hetch Hetchy), which is a public resource (water supply for San Francisco).
Obviously, there are examples of protecting nature against private encroachment as well...but even if you set those aside, the core tension exists: we always have to prioritize between competing goals. Folks like Muir prioritize nature for nature's sake. Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.
Protecting nature is both protecting ourselves and our interests. Sometimes extreme environmental harm comes with minimal benefit to anyone. Other times it’s the reverse where minimal harm results in vast benefits such as with the GPS network, generally it’s more balanced.
If anything the environmental argument is nature is extremely valuable, be sure the trade off is a net win for society.
Not really. Muir argued that nature provided "spiritual nourishment" to people. Like I said in another comment, the argument was that nature was a public resource, so should be preserved so everyone could benefit and use the resource. Preserving "nature for natures sake" is a much more modern argument.
>Others prioritize giving water to millions of people. Neither group is wrong.
Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.
Sure, fine. I'm not trying to re-characterize Muir's beliefs for the sake of an argument. I'm agreeing that he had a reason to think nature itself was a public good. But then, so is the water supply. There's an inherent tension. Attempts to ignore this tension are over-simplifying the problem.
> Given that the discussion has moved from "Is it worthwhile to protect nature from exploitation so all can enjoy it?" to include "Are we going to destroy the climate and with it our society", I think it's safe to say one group was wrong.
Maybe. It doesn't change the question of whether or not Hetch Hetchy should exist, or if cattle should graze on public lands, or any of a thousand other issues of the same shape that have existed forever.
Also, frankly, there are plenty of folks who think the benefits of mitigating global warming are not worth the costs: if you believe that there's any limit on what we might do to stop the phenomenon, then you're one of them. It's a continuum, and absolutist positions on either side of the issue are more heat than light.
As per usual, we will end up in some middle ground as a society that satisfies nobody completely.
While that's true, that's not a reason to ignore nature -- "nature" evolved over thousands of years to stay in balance. When man makes significant changes (like draining wetlands to turn into agriculture), then that balance is broken, and you can end up with catastrophic floods in developed areas.
Nature doesn't really care if new areas get flooded, that's just a new state of nature. But all of the people that were flooded out of their town care that the flood patterns changed due to the wetland loss.
Rather than creating a better-than-emergency solution up front, they could've created a more temporary solution with the intent of replacing it with a long term maintainable solution.
Consider as an analogous project temporary bridges which are built until construction of long lasting maintainable bridges are completed.
edit: I originally said "they should've", as if I were speaking from a place of authority, which I am absolutely not.
Yes, as they should. The issue is not doing environmental impact studies, but how long they take, how expensive they are, and how opaque the process is. The assumptions, methods and data should be as public as possible so objections can be made and dealt with logically.
As an example, my parents live in a relatively conservative location and the public utility decided that they were going to replace all their coal power plants with wind power. There was a huge uproar and their response was “here is our model and our data, please find plausible scenarios where wind power isn’t cheaper than coal.” The opposition died away because it was obvious that the switch was the best move.
So much water is controlled and diverted on the Colorado that it is rare that it reaches the Gulf of California, yet we rarely talk about the havoc that has wreaked on the communities in Mexico downstream from the dams.
The death of the Aral Sea is a more well known environmental disaster.
> Sustainability at all costs has its own costs
You know what else has its own costs? Choosing to live in a place with flooding and without electricity. Same as following poor farming practices.
You can't take bad decisions from others and use shuffle the responsibility onto the environment. "Oh looks like we can't do the sustainable thing because then we'd have to deal with the consequences of our own actions."
Choosing only to settle in places without flooding (or any other natural disaster) and with infrastructure already built out is what some might characterize as unreasonably limiting.
Of course many geoengineering projects likely are way more beneficial over their lifetime, but the analysis must be done to look beyond immediate benefits to ensure we don't destabilize the future in the process. To do things right we have to be better at making calls on which technologies are needed yesterday or today versus tomorrow or never.
Sustainability now is far more important than in times past, as we are now reaching the ceiling of earth's carrying capacity. When we exceed that we risk generations of (or permanent) suffering. As our technology gets better, carrying capacity increases, but our sustainable capacity is far lower than the temporary capacity certain sugar rush solutions provide. These minimal to negative LTV solutions are foolish, not virtuous.
I agree that message is hard to deliver to people, hopefully our species gets wiser so that we won't need to ever have conversations like that in the future. But the only way to reach that point is to break the cycle of unsustainable growth.
Governments ignoring or not funding that is their problem.
How can I discover if some action X is an attempt to outwit nature?
This rings especially true in relation to much of our work in tech, as I think you were pointing to. It’s easy to run an AB test and look at the win, forgetting that for every new thing, you now have to support it. For the easy to maintain stuff, you might even forget how it works, so the team of ten who built it turns into a single part time maintainer.
Our whole human society is based on outwitting nature. Previously, open fractures were uniformly fatal. Now, they are routinely treated. Previously, you had to get infected with a disease to get immunity, now we have vaccines. Previously, crossing oceans was a rare event, maybe a small animal got trapped on a log in the right current? Now we can cross oceans in a matter of hours. Previously, you relied on your own skin to try to keep warm. Humans, however, learned they could keep warm by wearing animal skins or other clothes.
All of human progress has been built on outwitting nature.
I remember seeing an old video depicting the development of the Florida Everglades, probably from the 40's or 50's, forget where I saw it. The narration was the most infuriating example of mans hubris as the narration was set over footage of bulldozers plowing down trees and brush. I can not recall the narration in detail but it went something like "Man has learned to conquer the land and bend nature to his will..."
Many of the dams we're talking about here were built with this insane hubris. A time when building technology was advanced and we could seemingly defeat the laws of nature with sky scrapers that reach into the heavens and dams that hold back the mightiest of rivers. As if the only goal was the defeat of nature and make a crap load of money in the process...
This is the same problem I have with capitalism. The end result is never good enough. Why not perfect one thing? There's a reason why so much software has lasted decades and it isn't because it gets a daily update.
I don't even understand what kind of justice system we have. Any sensible justice system would order to build a new dam if there is even a slight possibility that millions of lives are in danger. But not in this country! Things like this are the reason why i want to leave this country. It's run by idiots. My PRs get blocked for having a spelling mistake in the variable name but we allow to have a 125 year old damaged dam running without even thinking about decomissioning it at some point!!
[1] Google maps location of the dam - https://goo.gl/maps/vRooaj2Qb2kSRD6w7
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullaperiyar_Dam
[3] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/...
Nuclear — 0.2 to 1.2 deaths per 10 TWh
Natural gas — 0.3-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
Hydroelectric — 1.0-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
Coal — 2.8 to 32.7 deaths per 10 TWh
https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-o...
Coal plants release sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and fine particles, which cause air pollution. It's difficult to estimate precisely the number of deaths caused by polluted and lower quality air.
(Not aimed at you: you've obviously been very fair in capturing the issues with the data as presented).
Nuclear advocates will often complain that the deaths from Chernobyl get disproportionate press compared to the perpetual toll that is daily operations for coal. But just ignoring the deaths - I can't see how that's justified in good faith.
If you count disaster deaths for some methods of producing a resource (power) and ignore them for others, I'm calling you a bad-faith actor.
The primary responsibility of Banqiao dam is to control flood. Power generation was secondary.
And in this case, the flooding was almost certainly made worse by the dam, since there was a calamitous failure mode. That is _not_ to say that people would not have died otherwise from the flooding.
The dams were not built to produce power, they were built to protect the area. The power generation was done _because_ the dams were there, not the other way around.
That is, even if the power wasn't wanted, this disaster would have happened, so from that perspective, this is not deaths caused because of power generation.
In the other power generation cases, the object causing the deaths is _only_ being created to create that power. Without that power need, the object would not have existed.
For example, it is possible to generate energy from tidal waves. However I don't think that anyone would suggest that means that all deaths from a Tsunami should be attributed to tidal wave power generation.
The parallel here is that this (series of) dam(s) was built to control nature, and failed spectacularly at doing so. Is that the result of the power generation?
There _are_ dams that are build primarily for power generation, these would make sense to include in the stats. If the dam failed because of a malfunction in the power generator, that would make sense to include in the stats. But that does not appear to have been the case here.
I have never seen that, but of course you would reduce the numbers.
It would be zero, if like some nuclear facilities the electricity was purely a byproduct. Unless I guess something that does the power creates the mess.
Plutonium production: Wikipedia right panel: "Primary use Generation of electricity and production of weapon grade plutonium"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
Design safety issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Design_flaws_and_safety_i...
The British and French did it with their early Magnox reactors as well, which have a couple design similarities. Also dual-purpose.
If you're addressing a question like, say, whether it would be safer to build more nuclear power or more hydropower, then you really just need to know "if I build N dams, how many people will they kill in the next 100 years," and the same for nuclear plants. Unless you have reason to believe that hydropower dams are inherently safer than dams built primarily for other purposes, it makes sense to look at all dam failures.
If we want to know the risk of doing that, we should get the largest sample size by counting all the dams.
Personally I think that the best solution is to switch to nuclear for all the baseload and then some and convert existing dams to pumped storage if necessary.
Sounds like we agree on solutions :)
Banqiao? Not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436
And Chernobyl is one of the more transparent cases. There were studies done on the damage because the disaster was caused by the weak Soviet empire which everyone on the west wanted to bring down. Other disasters, like three mile island and fukushima have certainly killed hundreds of thousands but everyone is very careful not to do a study on that.
So what I am saying is these statistics are not to be trusted. They are mostly an indication of the political power the owners of certain power plants have.
The worst-case 'reputable' estimate is 27,000 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. A million is way, way out there.
In that case, they let the water out of the dam and use a diamond chain saw to cut it from the top till the bottom, in the middle of the dam. The concrete will then use this space to fill in and reduce it's pressure, so that the dam can be filled again.
Here is a german video showing this procedure for a dam in Switzerland.
https://www.20min.ch/story/10-tonnen-beton-werden-aus-mauer-...
For the US 2017: (2021 report is due in a few weeks...)
"ASCE’s 2017 Infrastructure Report Card graded the nation’s dams a “D.”
The average age of dams in this nation is 56 years, and the number of high-hazard potential dams – those whose failure would result in the loss of life – increased nearly 52% between 2005 and 2015 due to continued population growth and development below dams.
The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that the combined total cost to rehabilitate the nation’s dams exceeds $64 billion, with $22 billion of that needed just for the high-hazard potential dams. "
https://www.asce.org/advocacy/water-resources/
Its not just Dams.
Even after a highway collapses not much changes (https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/10-years-after-the-...)
The video goes into detail about how deadly each of our energy gathering methods are. It also goes into detail about how many are killed per kWh.
I had no idea hydro was as deadly as it is before this video, I highly recommend anyone with 10 minutes to spare give it a watch. The channel is incredibly great in general.
As the Dam owner, you're boned.
Morale of the story, never be there for the end of life of any infrastructure you commission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo
When I was a student (many years ago) I used to work in the summers at a very large industrial maltings that supplied malt to a lot of the "quality" whisky brands.
Edit: Scotland produces about 1.3 billion bottles of whisky a year worth ~£5billion:
https://www.scotch-whisky.org.uk/insights/facts-figures/
Edit2: There is a Diageo site ~10km from where I live that is 1.5km x 0.5km of warehouses full of whisky!
Of course governments need to require the insurance, but once they do insurance companies are good at figuring out risk. This is much easier for governments to do, than to actually allocate money to do the work when they are the owners. Somehow insurance payments are ignored in government budgeting, probably because they self-insurance and so there is no line item to look at.
While the power generated by hydro dams can be displaced by alternatives like solar, wind, and types of nuclear generation (if we'd ever get over the political boogeyman and have military engineers do what is necessary for safety and security), there remain two use cases that are less well served.
Dams provide reservoirs which are useful for managing irrigation and droughts; some might also have features like the Banks lake associated with the Grand Coulee Dam complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam#Pump-generati...
I have been watching a lot of videos on YT about this very subject. The amount of no longer economically viable dams we have is quite large. But the company that built the thing probably went out of business decades ago. The local areas saw 'hey free lake' and built tons of houses along the shore, and see the lakes as a benefit to their area (recreation/tourism).
Taking one out is a huge undertaking. As you have to make the 'hey free lake' people happy. You also can not just blast it wide open or you end up creating a flood. The previous lake is now just a big pool of 100+ years of mud. So you have to plan out how to dewater carefully, re-seed (with plants native to the area), and maybe even rebuild the bed of the river/stream. All of that costs decent amounts of time and money.
You could say 'oh the guys who built it should have paid for it to be removed'. They are long gone and the money is spent, there is no company to sue, and the 4th gen heir may live in a single wide. We have what we have and have to go from there.
Usually what happens is if the current dam is stable, nothing is done. If fixing the dam costs less than rebuild, they fix it. If fixing the dam costs more than deconstruction, then it is removed.
Aren't these things typically owned by a co-op or public organization? If they are privately owned and producing electricity I can't see how they went out of business. Once the dam is built and operational the damn thing prints money.
Which is often different than the company or entity that commissioned the construction.
Also many of these things are not 'automatic' they need care. Such as switching things at the right time, replacing parts, etc. You may not even be able to buy the correct switches or motors anymore (the NY subway has this issue) and maybe you can get one used from some other dam that is being decommissioned. So they just turn the thing off and walk away. Usually they cut some deal with the local gov to take control. Who think they are getting a 'free park' when they are getting a giant mess. Sometimes they even say 'you do not want it' and the local gov is dead set on getting it for a park. So you end up with things like love canal.
"Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter"
> Eager reveals that our modern conception of a natural landscape is wrong, distorted by the trapping of millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat.
https://www.bengoldfarb.com/eager
Here's a video with the author:
> Environmental journalist and author Ben Goldfarb joined us to discuss the history of this world-changing species; how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, and climate change; and how we can coexist with this vital but occasionally challenging species.
But yes -- transparent dams would look awesome! :D
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/150-feared-dead-...
I've seen the math, but it has been a while.
There's the National Inventory of Dams in the US:
Congress first authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to inventory dams in the United States with the National Dam Inspection Act (Public Law 92-367) of 1972. The NID was first published in 1975, with a few updates as resources permitted over the next ten years. The Water Resources Development Act of 1986 (P.L. 99-662) authorized USACE to maintain and periodically publish an updated NID, with re-authorization and a dedicated funding source provided under the Water Resources Development Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-3). USACE also began close collaboration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state regulatory offices to obtain more accurate and complete information. The National Dam Safety and Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-310) and the Dam Safety Act of 2006 reauthorized the National Dam Safety Program and included the maintenance and update of the NID by USACE. More recently, the NID was reauthorized as part of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act of 2014 and the Water Resources Development Act of 2018.
https://nid.sec.usace.army.mil/ords/f?p=105:22:6387799923169...:::
Global Dam Watch: "GDW curates and hosts three leading global dam databases, and provides summary information and links to many additional global, regional and national datasets"
Globale Georeferenced Database of Dams (contrived acronym GOODD) (38,667 records)
Global Reservoir and Dam Database (GRanD) (6,862 records)
Future Hydropower Reservoirs and Dams (FHReD) (3,700 records)
Also lists external datasets, ICOLD (59,071 records), FAO AQUASTAT (14,500), and OpenStreetMap (54,308).
And regional sets: AMBER Atlas/Europe (630,000 records), US National Inventory of Dams (see above) (90,580 records), and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe_Dam#/media/File:Lak...
This seems like some stats run on the CIGB/ICOLD's database (world register of dams) https://www.icold-cigb.org/GB/world_register/world_register_...
And notably what they mean by a large dam: A dam with a height of 15 metres or greater from lowest foundation to crest or a dam between 5 metres and 15 metres impounding more than 3 million cubic metres
The knowledge is already there, it's about funding and not overbuilding what you can't maintain. For the same reasons many bridges are reaching old age/end of life.