this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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It might be cheaper financially, but we've known about the huge environmental cost of dams for decades now. It boggles my mind that people suggest it in the same sentence as renewables.
Let alone that the immediate risk to life and property if a dam bursts can be similar to that of a nuclear meltdown.
Though I wonder what the environmental impacts are of mining Lithium to produce batteries on massive scales vs pumped hydro batteries to support solar whens it's dark or not very windy. There's plenty of other options as well like an elevator battery thing, but pumped hydro is probably more cost effective and safer to run as it's something we already know how to operate locally, the impact will just need to be managed.
Pumped hydro is not exactly a dam. There's a hole and 2 water reservoirs. Yes there's a cost but so does anything.
We are talking in the Australian context where the dams were built in the '50s for hydro power.
And? We should be decommissioning and demolishing any that are upstream of settlements because of their huge risk of catastrophe.
Dams help prevent natural disasters. Preventing flooding is famously why the Aswan High Dam was built in Egypt, and the presence of flood-managed dams in SEQ is possibly one of the reasons we were affected so much less badly here in 2022 than Northern NSW, where the dams are comparatively small, ungated, and have no active management during flood conditions.
I agree that dams are not great ecologically and we should avoid building them, especially given how incredibly useful solar and wind power are (though wind has its own ecological problems). But it's not especially useful to say that they have a "huge risk of catastrophe".
There are a class of American privately owned dams that recently got press for being at risk of catastrophe. I think that's what informed that lemming