8 ms·

I took a tour with the Corps of Engineers earlier this week at a dam on the Snake River. Apparently it isn't that difficult to get a tour, which I recommend to

I took a tour with the Corps of Engineers earlier this week at a dam on the Snake River. Apparently it isn't that difficult to get a tour, which I recommend to any member of the public. My politics are very progressive, but like so many issues, the dams have been reduced to sound bytes rather than comprehensive understanding. I came away with an even greater feeling that this is a topic too complicated to just take a side, but rather the best possible outcomes happen when stakeholders work together. We need the fish, the energy, the irrigation, the flood control, and the ease of barge-based agricultural transportation. There is serious effort put into protecting wildlife (IE: fish) with very, very good outcomes. I think it's easy to assume that the pro-dam crowd is anti-environment, which couldn't be farther from the truth. What really solidified for me this week is that these dams have a defined lifetime. Many are reaching the end of that lifetime, but the technology to replace them with something else isn't really there yet. Given the net benefit and the massive costs of replacement, it's very clear to me we are better letting them run their natural lives rather than removing prematurely. As each reaches a point where it is no longer viable, that is when and where we should consider other options. 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? At the same time too often in these discussions there are other issues overlooked - like how much Washington / Oregon wheat goes down the river on barges that would otherwise be tractor trailers on the highways. Lots of problems to solve.

robobro 3y ago
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...
- mulmen 3y ago
  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.
  - poulsbohemian 3y ago
    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.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      > 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.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        It requires intent to maintain a certain level of ignorance, and apathy is often exaggerated on purpose which is also intent.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Good luck on your sales of Dylan16807’s dictionary but based on these definitions it doesn’t seem useful.
- freedomben 3y ago
  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.
- Retric 3y ago
  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.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  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.
groby_b 3y ago
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.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  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_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Oreg...
  - dzader 3y ago
    [dead]
  - groby_b 3y ago
    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.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  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.
freedomben 3y ago
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.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  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.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
nonameiguess 3y ago
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.
DeRock 3y ago
> 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 https://emrgy.com, and a volts podcast with the founder/CEO: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#de...
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  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.
- bozhark 3y ago
  What’s the output of such device?
  - TkTech 3y ago
    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-Specifications.pdf https://emrgy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Emrgy-Specifica...
    - timerol 3y ago
      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.
micro_cam 3y ago
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.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  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 )
  - poulsbohemian 3y ago
    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.
datatrashfire 3y ago
the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much looking at long term extinction.
travisgriggs 3y ago
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.

robobro 3y ago

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...

mulmen 3y ago
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.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  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.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    > 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.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      It requires intent to maintain a certain level of ignorance, and apathy is often exaggerated on purpose which is also intent.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Good luck on your sales of Dylan16807’s dictionary but based on these definitions it doesn’t seem useful.
freedomben 3y ago
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.
Retric 3y ago
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.
pfdietz 3y ago
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.

groby_b 3y ago

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.

margalabargala 3y ago
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_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Oreg...
- dzader 3y ago
  [dead]
- groby_b 3y ago
  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.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
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.

freedomben 3y ago

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.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
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.
- freedomben 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

nonameiguess 3y ago

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.

DeRock 3y ago

> 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 https://emrgy.com, and a volts podcast with the founder/CEO: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#de...

poulsbohemian 3y ago
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.
bozhark 3y ago
What’s the output of such device?
- TkTech 3y ago
  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-Specifications.pdf https://emrgy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Emrgy-Specifica...
  - timerol 3y ago
    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.

micro_cam 3y ago

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.

poulsbohemian 3y ago
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 )
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  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.

datatrashfire 3y ago

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

travisgriggs 3y ago

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.