Hacker News Reader

Pretty dark take (by all means feel free to correct me), but I am sometimes wondering if the fact that dam failures kill everybody and most of their families at once helps its public image since there's few remaining affected people that can spread awareness.

(not saying that hydro is a bad choice; it looks to be the best when possible thanks to load following and ability to double as storage)

View on HN

They also produce a ton of methane by trapping a valley's worth of vegetation at the bottom of an artificial lake, and need dredging to stay functional, but who's really counting?

Please provide a citation showing that this is even remotely a significant problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, how much methane compared to one cow?

The overwhelming majority of deaths from dam failures in living memory were the result of one disaster in China in 1975 which was suppressed by the communist government. It wasn't until 20 years later that Westerners started to learn about it.

Sure, there is this one outlier, but there are quite a few >100s deaths incidents in the West too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

Most of them were not hydro-electric dams, which are statistically more recent and in practice way more effectively monitored (people are permanently occupying most of the not-tiny-ones).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com