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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

Seems we've painted ourselves in a corner in several ways.

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...

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> 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.

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.

> Sustainability at all costs has its own costs: the good which isn't done while waiting for the perfect.

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.

Not to mention that they appeal to arguments like "we must protect nature". Nature couldn't care less about human's existence. Our planet has seen astroid strikes that caused way more harm to ecosystems than we will ever do.

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.

"Protecting nature" isn't just about not destroying ourselves though.

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.

> 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.

Nature for natures sake is largely a straw man though. Factories prefer to dump waste into the air that people want to breathe. They want to dump waste into rivers people want to drink or fish from etc.

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.

>Folks like Muir prioritize nature for nature's sake.

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.

> 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.

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.

What is nature? The rocks, the trees, the wind? Or the living and breathing animals who have just as much right to coexist on this planet as we do?

Rights are a man made thing.

By "just as much right", I mean to say that we as humans scarcely have a "right" to this land either. So what gives us the "right" to assert our dominance over other creatures to the point of extreme detriment? When does it stop being simple predatory domination and become something sinister and wicked?

Nature couldn't care less about human's existence

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.

I think the point still remains though that long term maintenance is a much harder problem that wasn't dealt with. Emergency measures, such as what you're describing here, should not be solved with permanent solutions which cut corners for expediency.

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.

They were also built at a time when environmental impact (including on fish, natural beauty, etc.) was much more of a fringe concern. The Redwall Dam in the Grand Canyon wasn't quite built but the Glen Canyon Dam was and almost certainly wouldn't be today. And many smaller dams in New England for example are being decommissioned today.

In addition, many smaller dams in New England were built to power mills, which are no longer operational. Despite no longer being needed and crumbling, the dams can't be removed until environmental impact studies can be completed, because we now require those.

> the dams can't be removed until environmental impact studies can be completed, because we now require those.

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.

The reason the environmental impact studies are kept opaque is because it's a terrible rent-seeking industry that thrives on cut & paste reports. The people doing the reports are very happy as things are, and don't want 'improvement'.

That’s so incredibly believable, it’s sad.

Benefits for some and costs for others, and in some cases benefits for some for only the short-term.

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.

Right. This contemporary attitude of "no" is holding back progress. We're too comfortable and have forgotten that nature is harsh and unforgiving and had to be tamed through ingenuity and sweat and sacrifice. It's hard to build a dam but easy to virtue signal by advocating its removal at no cost to yourself.

> 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

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."

It's worth remembering that many of these places were settled before electricity was even an option. The Tennessee River Valley was not settled in the 1960s. Many places prone to occasional flooding have compelling reasons to be settled. Arable land, navigable rivers, and more.

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.

Unsustainable projects like these dams, which do give temporary benefit, also encourage both migration closer to a point of failure and unsustainable population growth. In our attempt to alleviate life's challenges for ~100s of people, a few generations later we have ~1000s+ at risk. The lifetime value (net total of good vs suffering caused) may not even be in the positive.

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.

> ...but we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder...

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.

> 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.

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...

If the goal was to “defeat nature”, we seem to have won. Of course, being a part of nature seems to have eluded us, so we have ... defeated ourselves?

The three gorges dam was recently built; and closer to SV, Site C is under construction in British Columbia. There's definitely folks alive who know how to build dams.

I think the issue is less the lack of knowledge, and more the lack of political will to meaningfully tackle the problem.

The problem is you need to burn alot of dead trees to make a dam and EROEI is dwindling too fast for this to become a viable option. Nuclear and hydro will never be rebuilt to the same level we have now.

Nuclear is being built in China like crazy. They‘re currently constructing 12 plants at the same time.

China has less reactors than france with 20x the population. They would need 1000 reactors to match.

For a commodore user you are very optimistic about things getting better!

More nuclear plants are getting closed than built.

It's still a far cry from the 70's. My quick counting showed the US opening around 40 from 70-75.

I hope they're better at running nuclear power plants than they are at running infectious disease labs.

Not really.

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.

Nuclear has its own decommissioning and long term disposal problem.

If anything nuclear's problem is even more political than practical.

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.

It's the same for hydro, the lack of political stakeholders in decomissioning process. I wasn't suggesting that it's physically impossible.

Nuclear has 1.000.000.000x the energy density of batteries so yes, but you need dead trees to build and maintain power lines, the power grid cannot be remade after it's current decline.

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!

> wood stove for water heater

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.

> the power grid cannot be remade

What has changed such that you could not remake the power grid? Do we lack the raw materials or know how?

And then reality set in. This lifestyle simply won't happen.

You don't need trees for powerlines. Steel and an excavator is more than enough. Actually, just a shovel would be enough.

Capital spending and construction are far more friendly to electoral politics than ongoing maintenance and operating expenditures.

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.

Reject democracy, embrace technocracy.

You can have a democracy that operates largely like a technocracy if you make it an actual democracy and align incentives.

I'm currently on a project in California to repair and rehab a dam to extend its service life, working for a contractor that just finished a dam rehab job and is bidding on two more in the future.

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.

> Site C is under construction in British Columbia.

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.

My friend does some auxiliary work for Site C. He said everything is over budget and a mess. The initial contractor underbid because they thought they could get migrant workers in. But now they are dealing with union workers so the contractors messed it up badly.

Somewhat relatedly; I have PEng friends who worked on the budgeting for Transmountain before the Grits bought it.

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.

All of BC's dams were built in an earthquake zone. That's sort-of a given.

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.

We're not just talking about natural earthquake risk. The fracking that's happening near the dam is actively making the earthquakes worse.

https://thenarwhal.ca/fracking-induced-earthquakes-buffer-zo...

Why on earth are the NDP allowing fracking that close to those dams? Holy hell.

Hey, give credit - the Liberals allowed it, the NDP just continued to allow it.

And they‘re building a new dam in Turkey which destroys large areas of cultural-historic land just to construct a hydro-plant with just 1200 MW installed electricity, just 1/4 of the power delivered by the new Akkuyu nuclear power plant.

> 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.

Dams really aren't environmentally friendly in the way many people assume they are.

Or as safe; 230.000 people died in just one instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure). 112 people died building the Hoover Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths).

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... ).

Unlike water, radiation can't be seen which is why it is so frightening to the average person.

>radiation can't be seen

Not to be pedantic, but...

> radiation can't be seen

Neither can many other pollutants, but it can easily be detected, in fact it's probably one of the most easily detected.

Not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

Are there any studies comparing QALYs gained and lost instead of deaths?

Dams are MORE environmentally friendly than most of the alternatives so that assumption is not entirely wrong.

If the choice is between environmental damage from fracking or coal mining and deaths from coal pollution or flooding a valley somewhere...

Conveniently ignoring nuclear power.

MOST. I'm from Ontario and we get 58.3% of our electricity from clean, safe CANDU reactors. Why did you assert I'm ignoring nuclear power? It has nothing to do with Dams being LESS polluting than MOST of the alternatives.

Other than the massive areas of land they flood and destroy (but you don't live there right?), or the fish that can no longer swim upstream, or anyone downstream that has to deal with reduced flow...

Unfortunately nuclear power plants are notoriously bad at providing a) water supply and b) flood control. Especially the latter.

The Guardian kind of forgot to mention these as factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il%C4%B1su_Dam

Safety inspections of dams and preventative maintenance are a standard part of civil engineering.

Governments ignoring or not funding that is their problem.

Added to the problem is the general lack of funding around the world for infrastructure, owing to the fact that politicians control the purse strings and infrastructure isn't "sexy" [1][2]. Building something new that can be named after someone is no doubt easier to fund than the maintenance of something that already exists.

"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

Part of the issue with dams is that you don't have great safe-disconnect-and-fix options.

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.

The same options that existed while they were under construction also exist...

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.

Draining a huge lake is easier said than done though. Even if the bypasses are still up for it they almost certainly were not designed for that. In addition, every bridge and river bank downstream would need to be checked and possibly reinforced for a much higher flow rate.

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.

And then there's the inconvenient issue that in many places we've built on previously non-buildable land downstream.

You also need somewhere to put all of the boats, docks, and other floating infrastructure while the water is gone.

Physical engineering, maintenance is an oversight, much like software engineering.

> 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.

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.

> Basically, don't try to outwit nature.

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.

> Basically, don't try to outwit nature.

How can I discover if some action X is an attempt to outwit nature?

Even being alive means we’re trying to outwit nature.

You have widely adopted methodologies like agile that tell you to ignore bugs. Keep writing code, keep moving forward. Dojos to work on some of the back log, but keep moving forward.

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 think the lack of expertise will only drastically accelerate as the boomers start retirement. Interesting times

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