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I don't believe the Hoover Dam should be replicated. It's a marvel of engineering but I'm opposed to damming any rivers. Damming our rivers like that has had
by wavefunction 9y ago
I don't believe the Hoover Dam should be replicated. It's a marvel of engineering but I'm opposed to damming any rivers.
Damming our rivers like that has had such terrible and unforeseen environmental and economic consequences that I can only hope we un-dam wherever possible.
- iamatworknow 9y agoThere's a trade off. I'll take a dam that disrupts a local river ecosystem to coal fired power plants that throw millions of tons of CO2 and other hazardous material into the air impacting a much larger area. In the case of the Hoover Dam it's roughly 4 coal plants to produce the same power generation capacity.
- wavefunction 9y ago@iamatworknow Sure but there are better alternatives to either coal or hydro-electric. I think even a modern natural gas plant would be better until we can build a smart grid that can store during off-demand and handle peak-demand loads.
- zanny 9y agoDepending on how long the river has been dammed up, tearing it down can have reverse ecological consequences now. It only takes about a decade for the downstream to adapt to the limited water flow (or the alternative interpretation is everything dies off within a decade) but after that to reintroduce the full flow would destroy new life that has settled the new environment produced.