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> Something I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but to me is almost obvious - these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use. Is there a way that technology can be used in the Columbia, Snake, etc without the need for a dam?

There are some companies doing small scale hydro, by taking advantage of the natural flow of a river, without the use of any dam/head. Eg. see https://emrgy.com, and a volts podcast with the founder/CEO: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#de...

Yeah, my gut tells me when we get to a point where we have to either rebuild or remove a lot of these dams, we'll pursue technology like this as a happy path. Or at least that should be part of the options.

What’s the output of such device?

10kW to 40kW according to their spec sheet[1], so seems irrelevant as an alternative. A single one of the older dams getting replaced, the Iron Gate Dam, has a capacity of 18MW. One powers a single small farm, the other powers entire towns, heavy industry, foundries...

And to be clear, these are small, old, dams. Modern dams and turbines produce far, far more.

[1]: https://emrgy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Emrgy-Specifica...

These turbines are meant to be used in a fleet, along a river. They take about 16 feet across per pair, so call it 20 across the normal flow of the river. They also do not block the flow, so more can be installed a little downstream, depending on the pitch of the riverbed. Assuming 5 groups per mile, 10 miles of flow of the Klamath River will give you the capacity to install 1000 of these, for a total capacity of 10 MW to 40 MW.

Saying that these are too small is like saying that solar panels are too small. The module size has nothing to do with the total generation - they're built to be manufactured and placed in bulk.

Source: I listened to the referenced podcast episode when I came out, and just looked at the spec sheet to refresh my memory.

The rosy scenario, then, is lots of these little turbines?

Won't there be separate NIMBY lawsuits about every single one of these, claims that they're unstudied and cause ecological damage, ruin the natural enjoyment of the river, etc. etc.?

In the rivers with minimal debris, with long enough stretches to place them all, with enough infra (read: cabling) to supply\gather electricity from them all to the one/two/three substation... All these while providing an efficient way to grind all the fishes.

And canoe or kayak enjoyers.

These absolutely cannot be used in these kinds of rivers. Even their own promos only show irrigation channels. These things will chop salmon like sushi and running miles of infrastructure for them up and down a river is fantasy.

Solar is far more practical and far more dense then these things to replace a hydro dam.

> these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use

When it comes to wave power, "in discussion" is the operative word. Modern pelton wheels are 95%+ effective in converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy and have been in operation for decades. They are super well understood and optimized and are deployed at scales of dozens of megawatts per unit. Total installed capacity is probably into the hundreds of gigawatts.

AFAIK, no wave power project is above 10 MW as of now and the total installed base is still tiny despite decades of research. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wave_power_stations for example. It is a combination of the ocean being a super unfriendly environment for technology in combination with all of the wave energy extraction technologies being extremely inefficient.

Small scale hydro is pretty old. 15-20 years ago I stayed in a small inn/hotel in China in a national park on a huge mountain that got its power via a water wheel on a stream fed by melting glaciers. It was fragile, so occasionally it get pushed off, causing power to go out while the hotel staff repositioned it.

No way you’re going to make as much electricity as with conventional hydro.

Furthermore, you lose the ability to dispatch more or less electricity depending on demand, which is increasingly important in grids with a lot of wind and solar.

It may well be that the environmental costs of many dams aren’t worth it - and lots of dams produce very little or no hydroelectricity. But run of river hydro is not an easy substitute for those hydro plants that do produce significant energy.

We really don't need the energy - contributions from Klamath dams have been somewhat minuscule, at 163MW.

As for "serious effort protecting wildlife with good outcomes", it's worth keeping in mind that the dams are directly responsible for excessive growth of cyanobacteria. Leading to a Klamath that's seriously depleted. (No, the dams aren't the only reason, but they are a large one). The net "benefit" of the dams staying around would be a significantly damaged ecosystem. And let's be clear, they have reached the point where they are no longer viable, unless you externalize costs. PacifiCorp had the option to upgrade them to have less eco impact (salmon ladders etc), and they looked at the cost and said "nah, thanks, let's not".

As for stakeholders coming together - that's kind of what happened here. It's not like this was an overnight decision. It's been almost two decades of work by folks involved. As always, in a multi-stakeholder environment, not everybody is happy. And nobody is 100% happy.

163MW is 1% of all power generation in the state [0]

That's not huge, but it's not nothing either. Feels like enough to not simply hand wave away, especially since that's carbon-free energy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Oreg...

Note that it's California & Oregon - and 163MW is 0.5% of CA's power generation, so probably around 0.3% across both states.

Enough to give up on when it doesn't make commercial sense and destroys an ecosystem, the number doesn't stand in a vacuum.

Step back from the Klamath dams and read my comments as regarding the issue more broadly, as there are a lot more dams across the PNW being targeted for removal and/or that will reach functional obsolescence in upcoming decades. By everything I've read the Klamath dams were generally viewed by many parties as having reaching their natural end. Other dams with many decades to go are already being studied for removal (including the one I toured on the Snake), and that's where there's conflict.

I tend to agree. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I've also come to recognize that these issues can be complicated. Progress is made iteratively and sometimes gradually. While I would love to drop a hammer on the over-fishing of Pacific Salmon for example, when you meet a person who lives in Homer Alaska and lives off of their fishing and you realize that if we completely shut down fishing for a year or two, that person would be economically destroyed. That's just one person in the equation. There are many thousands more. There are ways to improve the salmon population without wiping people out or causing major havoc, but it requires people to learn a whole lot more about the issues than what can be reduced to sound bytes.

The flip side of this is easily illustrated:

Look up the North Atlantic Cod Fishery. We failed to tell fishermen to stop fishing, and as a result the entire ecosystem collapsed and has never returned. They had to stop fishing anyway, and their way of life collapsed too.

Its a tricky reality to balance, but the fishing industry have historically always gotten this wrong. At a certain point you have to be willing to tell people that their way of life is unsustainable.

Of course, then we have to recognize that most of us live an unsustainable way of life, fishermen just happen to be living unsustainably in a shorter term than the rest of us.

Absolutely, completely agree. The fishing industry has demonstrated extensively that they can't be trusted to self-manage (North Atlantic Cod, and Pacific Salmon are great examples). The appeal of over-fishing for short term gains at the cost of long-term is just too good for them to refuse, and they will take what they can. Normalcy bias[1] (which they come by honestly as humans) will do it's thing and convince them that a little bit won't hurt, or it will never disappear, or whatever it needs to. Whatever the solution is, it will definitely include reductions in fishing allowances, and that's going to hurt for producers and consumers alike, but it still has to be done. If we don't, in 5 to 10 years they'll be changing jobs anyway cause the fish will be gone and the ecosystem devastated.

The trick isn't to avoid all suffering, that's just not possible. The trick is (IMHO) to first understand it, then minimize it. Homer Alaska guy will have to accept reduced income for at least a few years until the population rebounds. In the end, at least his business, home, and way of life aren't completely destroyed.

I don't know how we establish/create an independent and reasonable regulator to manage limits, but that's what we need to figure out. The existing entities are too corrupt and have proven that they can't be trusted. On the flip side, some environmental groups are too extreme and also not trustworthy regulators. It's a very hard and complex problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Your sentence can be generalized: "The appeal of [over-exploiting natural resources] for short term gains at the cost of long-term is just too good [...] to refuse". But, as with overfishing, the bill is eventually coming...

I may regret making this comparison, but bear with me here... the thinking person realizes that the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are in no way an accurate reflection of two camps on that issue. In the same way, what's clear to me is that dams are not anti-salmon, despite the common political portrayal that dams == dead salmon, no dams == return of the salmon. Could the fish (not just salmon, but also lampreys, sturgeon, trout, etc...) do better without dams? Sure, possibly, but let's not overlook that these dams also employ technology to cool the water to counter climate effects. And, the rate of fish through the dams is pretty darn amazing -- 95+% will survive their up /down journey. So I'm with you - we all have to study and look at the big picture and try to reign in the various political forces that may not be acting with cool heads (on all sides of the equation).

The issue with fish ladders is not that they kill fishes, actively. The issue is that fish just don't really go back up fish ladders at dam, with the rates estimated as low as 3%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder#Effectiveness

Another issue with dams and ladders for that matter is that they significantly lengthen the journey time. Additionally protected marine mammals take advantage of the backlog of these blockages and consume significantly more fish as they have no quick escape.

These dams don’t have fish ladders, and retrofitting them would cost astronomical amounts more than they could recover by selling the power.

Jobs should not come before the environment. Humans can easily adapt. The environment less so.

You say "humans can easily adapt", but some of these families have been in the fishery trade for generations and would rather give up their religion than being forced to live on land like a normie. This is absolutely not something they will willingly do.

If you've ever tried telling an Evangelical that taking this whole Jesus thing so seriously is maybe not the best idea for humanity then you know what I mean.

That’s a weird statement. The environment does easily adapt, but in ways that humans might not be able to adapt to. When we talk about ecosystems and climate and such, we talk about maintaining them for our own interests (so not shooting ourselves in the foot making a bad trade off). At the end of the day, the Earth will adapt to anything, and a few million years after humans have gone extinct, there will hardly be any trace that we ever existed.

I have no dog in this race, but couldn't you make the same argument for whaling?

Fellow south east Washington resident here. This is so well said. I don't think people realize how interconnected these projects are with the whole region. Power is only one piece of the equation.

The Columbia Basin irrigation projects are a vast endeavor. The amount of food production that relies on the irrigation provided by these damns is HUGE (I work in Agtech and am regularly on many of these farms).

Multiple towns have grown over the years on the banks of these rivers. Ripping damns down would mean either some other form of flood remediation or just abandoning the towns.

And as an avid water skiier... the Columbia River is some of the best water skiing in the world (I've skiied many other spots). So there's a small deal about recreation as well. :D

That may sound like an "over my dam body" pitch. It's not meant to. It's meant to augment the parent post. You have to talk about the whole picture, not just the part you get excited about when you have big interconnected things like this.

I second going and visiting some of them. They're similar but different. Grand Coulee is a major testament to 40's large scale projects. I think Wanapum is cool because it shows that you can do a "public works" dam. And Dvorjak is pretty impressive as well, especially from a flood control/river management POV.

So do you think the anti-dam crowd is anti-environment?

No one wants to be labeled as anti-environment, but when assigning labels, I think it helps to look at the big picture. I think the anti-nuclear crowd happens to be anti-environment in practice, even if many of them are tree hugging, organic eating, blah blah blah...

I have never met someone who is anti-environment. That’s an active stance. Everyone values the natural environment differently but labeling someone as actively opposed to it betrays a deep misunderstanding of other views.

I dunno man, I've met some of these eastern washington landowners that have their heads pretty far up their own asses. At some point apathy and ignorance become malice.

> At some point apathy and ignorance become malice.

Malice requires intent. Apathy and ignorance do not.

I see no constructive outcome of following this logically flawed line of thinking.

It requires intent to maintain a certain level of ignorance, and apathy is often exaggerated on purpose which is also intent.

Good luck on your sales of Dylan16807’s dictionary but based on these definitions it doesn’t seem useful.

Why do you need to assign an "anti-environment" label to anybody? It conveys very little useful meaning, and virtually nobody is going to assign that label to themselves so you immediately break down communication and polarize and you end up getting nowhere.

Being anti dam/nuclear/whatever doesn’t mean you have the same reasons as everyone else with that opinion. You can be anti dam because of safety concerns around failure of a specific dam. You can dislike nuclear because you dislike massive subsidies.

It’s important to address someone’s actual concerns not simply whatever you feel is easiest to attack.

The anti-nuclear movement maybe was anti-environment, in the sense that avoiding nuclear led to higher CO2 emissions, but I don't think that's true now for new nuclear construction.

Is anyone seriously proposing removing dams on the Colombia or Snake? Or really any dam used for irrigation?

Most of the removals seem to be on very small scale hydro projects on coastal river that produce very little power, aren’t used for irrigation and open up a lot of salmon habitat.

Yes - see the back and forth between Washington state and the Feds over the past year+. Would it happen immediately? No, but the goal has been stated and studies begun. It's even a part of the official party platform of the Washington State Democrats (much to the chagrin of those of us over here in Eastern Washington )

I suspect the Venn diagram of HN readers and Capitol Press readers (western states ag newspaper) is small, but just today there was an article in the CP talking about conflicts over the dams between various groups and the White House. Definitely an ongoing political football here in the PNW.

This was very much all stakeholders coming together. The power company and the tribe that is supposed to own the land and water rights had an agreement as far back as 2008, but it required Congressional approval, Congress never voted on it, then it was repackaged as only needing agency approval, and got that, but then Trump came in with the mandate to make sure nothing Obama could possibly get credit for actually happened, so it was reversed. If they didn't need to involve the federal government, this would have happened decades ago.

the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much looking at long term extinction.