4 ms·

Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately misleading. People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths fr

Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately misleading. People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was not designed to do so (compare later speculative Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile material made incidental contamination a non-issue.

troupo 2y ago
> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. wat --- start quote --- In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses --- end quote --- This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants. By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam. Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  You missed my point completely. That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere. > Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima. Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Please educate yourself on how hydroelectric dams are constructed. And a large number of other dams are built not to prevent flooding, but to create water reservoirs and/or stem river flows. > Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? In the absolute vast majority of hydroelectric dams, yes. Following your logic, we should immediately stop because human deaths and devastation are built in to the dams
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    > Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago? Because obviously the opposite is true. Damns reduce the amount of people who drown during natural floods. Nuclear power reduces the amount of pollution and CO2 emissions (since people are just as likely to stop living in flood plains as accepting not having access to electricity)
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      > Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago? Absolutely not, and I'm not sure what I said that made you assume that. On that topic: I do believe that the economics for nuclear power are bad, will get worse comparatively and were never really good in the first place. I think there is a good reason that basically only a single nation on the planet went "full nuclear" for electric power (France), which they achieved basically thanks to ignoring the cost and pushing it as strategical measure instead (=> energy indepencence, specifically from oil). If everyone around them had went full nuclear the (economical) situation would be even worse (because everyone would compete for hydro/peak power and/or forced into operating plants in load-following mode). In conclusion: I think massive nuclear buildout would have made a lot of sense to mitigate climate change 30 years ago (but that was not really a realistic option then), and jumping on that bandwagon is no longer worth it. Just going for wind, solar, batteries and improved grid connectivity simply makes more sense now almost everywhere in my view.
lesuorac 2y ago
> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. The floods are significantly worse because of the dams. Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam is built. This causes 2 problems. 1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space. 2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood. --- However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than cancer.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > The floods are significantly worse because of the dams. No they are not. Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams, you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get uncontrolled flooding on dam failure, which tends to happen less often than... heavy rain. > The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space. Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space. That is a completely different argument from flood risk, though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam is even built.
wqaatwt 2y ago
> People don't die from flooding because of dams They certainly do if there is a catastrophic failure in the dam itself. Dam collapses due to human error are much, much more frequent than nuclear and much more deadly.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  This misses the point. Hydroelectric dams have a big negative cost component in human lives, because they protect a significant amount of them every single time there are flooding conditions (e.g. heavy rain) and the dam doesn't fail (which is obviously the huge majority of cases). Nuclear plants, on the other hand, protect a negligible amount of lives during floods, because they make for impractical shelters :P In my expeience, comparison in "lethality" between hydroelectricity and nuclear power are only ever made by people that are uninformed on flood management and/or want to push an agenda, and I wanted to provide a counterpoint to that.

troupo 2y ago

> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. wat --- start quote --- In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses --- end quote --- This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants. By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam. Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.

myrmidon 2y ago
You missed my point completely. That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere. > Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima. Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
- troupo 2y ago
  > That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity). Please educate yourself on how hydroelectric dams are constructed. And a large number of other dams are built not to prevent flooding, but to create water reservoirs and/or stem river flows. > Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? In the absolute vast majority of hydroelectric dams, yes. Following your logic, we should immediately stop because human deaths and devastation are built in to the dams
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago? Because obviously the opposite is true. Damns reduce the amount of people who drown during natural floods. Nuclear power reduces the amount of pollution and CO2 emissions (since people are just as likely to stop living in flood plains as accepting not having access to electricity)
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    > Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago? Absolutely not, and I'm not sure what I said that made you assume that. On that topic: I do believe that the economics for nuclear power are bad, will get worse comparatively and were never really good in the first place. I think there is a good reason that basically only a single nation on the planet went "full nuclear" for electric power (France), which they achieved basically thanks to ignoring the cost and pushing it as strategical measure instead (=> energy indepencence, specifically from oil). If everyone around them had went full nuclear the (economical) situation would be even worse (because everyone would compete for hydro/peak power and/or forced into operating plants in load-following mode). In conclusion: I think massive nuclear buildout would have made a lot of sense to mitigate climate change 30 years ago (but that was not really a realistic option then), and jumping on that bandwagon is no longer worth it. Just going for wind, solar, batteries and improved grid connectivity simply makes more sense now almost everywhere in my view.

lesuorac 2y ago

> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams. The floods are significantly worse because of the dams. Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam is built. This causes 2 problems. 1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space. 2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood. --- However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than cancer.

myrmidon 2y ago
> The floods are significantly worse because of the dams. No they are not. Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams, you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get uncontrolled flooding on dam failure, which tends to happen less often than... heavy rain. > The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space. Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space. That is a completely different argument from flood risk, though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam is even built.

wqaatwt 2y ago

> People don't die from flooding because of dams They certainly do if there is a catastrophic failure in the dam itself. Dam collapses due to human error are much, much more frequent than nuclear and much more deadly.

myrmidon 2y ago
This misses the point. Hydroelectric dams have a big negative cost component in human lives, because they protect a significant amount of them every single time there are flooding conditions (e.g. heavy rain) and the dam doesn't fail (which is obviously the huge majority of cases). Nuclear plants, on the other hand, protect a negligible amount of lives during floods, because they make for impractical shelters :P In my expeience, comparison in "lethality" between hydroelectricity and nuclear power are only ever made by people that are uninformed on flood management and/or want to push an agenda, and I wanted to provide a counterpoint to that.