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Power Earth

California's Successful Dam-Removal Project Continues (msn.com) 120

The Los Angeles Times checks in on America's largest dam-removal project, which they say is now "revealing a stark landscape that had been underwater for generations."

"A thick layer of muddy sediment covers the sloping ground, where workers have been scattering seeds and leaving meandering trails of footprints. In the cracked mud, seeds are sprouting and tiny green shoots are appearing." With water passing freely through tunnels in three dams, the Klamath River has returned to its ancient channel and is flowing unhindered for the first time in more than a century through miles of waterlogged lands. Using explosives and machinery, crews began blasting and tearing into the concrete of one of the three dams earlier this month... The emptying of the reservoirs, which began in January, is estimated to have released as much as 2.3 million tons of sediment into the river, abruptly worsening its water quality and killing nonnative perch, bluegill and bass that had been introduced in the reservoirs for fishing. Downstream from the dams, the river's banks are littered with dead fish. But tribal leaders, biologists and environmentalists say that this was part of the plan, and that the river will soon be hospitable for salmon to once again swim upstream to spawn... [The dams] blocked salmon from reaching vital habitat and degraded the river's water quality, contributing to toxic algae blooms in the reservoirs and disease outbreaks that killed fish...

Workers have been drilling holes in the top of the Copco No. 1 Dam, placing dynamite and setting off blasts, then using machinery to chip away fractured concrete. The dam, which has been in place since 1918, is scheduled to be fully removed by the end of August. The smaller Copco No. 2 Dam was torn down last year as the project began. Two earthen dams, the Iron Gate and the John C. Boyle, remain to be dismantled starting in May. If the project goes as planned, the three dams will be gone sometime this fall, reestablishing a free-flowing stretch of river and enabling Chinook and coho salmon to swim upstream and spawn along about 400 miles of the Klamath and its tributaries. Meanwhile, teams of scientists and workers are focusing on restoring the landscape and natural vegetation on about 2,200 acres of denuded reservoir-bottom lands...

River restoration advocates are optimistic. They say undamming the Klamath will demonstrate the potential for restoring free-flowing rivers elsewhere in California, and point to initial plans to remove two dams on the Eel River as another promising opportunity.

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California's Successful Dam-Removal Project Continues

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  • Success? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Sunday March 24, 2024 @11:43PM (#64341879)
    Does California now have even less water available?
    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Does California now have even less water available?

      Yes, the affected areas presumably have no dam water.

      • Re:Success? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Monday March 25, 2024 @12:11AM (#64341921)

        >> presumably have no dam water

        The dam was heavily silted up and the water was contaminated with algae bloom pollution.

        • >> presumably have no dam water

          The dam was heavily silted up and the water was contaminated with algae bloom pollution.

          Which dam? Using the singular here makes me wonder about your level of familiarity with the region. There are four dams being removed, and several others that are not.

          Heavily silted up? Not any more than any other dams of their age. Silting is just a fact for dams -- rivers carry sediment. Sediment settles out when river water hits the slow water beind a dam.

          The algae blooms are seasonal and primarly in the large lake (Upper Klamath Lake) being the Link River dam. Yeah, naming is weird. Link River is

        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          >> presumably have no dam water

          The dam was heavily silted up and the water was contaminated with algae bloom pollution.

          Man, it's like you and the mods all missed the joke....

      • Yes, the affected areas presumably have no dam water.

        So they're damned if they do, damned if they don't? Well, I'll be damned.

      • Nope. Same amount of water falls from the sky. Same amount spills down the mountains. Same amount of water available.

        • The rain falls in the winter.
          Water is needed in the summer.

        • You mean runs down to the ocean and is gone.

          In your universe there was never any reason to have reservoirs.

          reservoir /rez(r)vwär/
          noun
          a large natural or artificial lake used as a source of water supply.

          Nope, no need to have a water supply.

    • Re:Success? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Monday March 25, 2024 @12:16AM (#64341923)
      No, it has the same amount of water, its just in the river and flowing faster instead of sitting in the reservoir. That will now produce significantly more salmon in a river that once had enormous salmon runs. The result will be a far more productive river.
      • I guess there will be no droughts now the dams are gone... no need for water reservoirs.
        • This river is in a very sparsely populated part of the state all the way up North where it rains regularly even during draughts down south.

          • No need to pump that water to places it's needed. Instead we can just further drain the Colorado into dust.

            • That wasn't happening anyway. You're just concern trolling about things which are completely irrelevant to the situation.

              It's funny how the right hate California so much. I think the resentment comes from it being big, rich and blue.

              • As a Californian, I believe older dams probably should be pulled, but the state needs to invest in newer reservoirs as well to balance all this out.
                The state's population has DOUBLED since the last reservoir was built in the late 70s. That's over 40 years of no new capacity.
                They are, however, planning on a newer reservoir build in 2026. Hopefully.
          • This river is in a very sparsely populated part of the state all the way up North where it rains regularly even during draughts down south.

            Half right. It is sparseley populated, at least relative to the metropolitan areas I suspect most Slashdotters posting here live - maybe 125k people in the region.

            Where is this idea coming from that the Klamath basin is not going through drought? Long lasting major drought in the region. Fish people aren't happy they aren't getting the water they want. Farmers and ranchers aren't happy they aren't getting the water they want. Fish and bird die offs. Wells drying up as ground water levels sink. Very

        • Water is not our problem up here, power is. You can't get new or upgraded service because PGE refuses to upgrade the lines coming into town, and they vetoed offshore wind here the time before last that it was proposed. It was approved the last time, but it hasn't been built yet like it would have been.

          Power is out in my whole town right now, probably due to a tree down on a line but the outages page doesn't say. There is some risky dink sawdust to power plant at the mill but that's not enough to run the tow

      • Will the salmon come back? My understanding is that salmon return specifically to their hatching grounds, and clearly there have been no salmon hatched above the dams for a century. I suppose salmon must have some strategy for colonizing newly-available spawning grounds, since rivers do shift and change. Maybe it'll have to be slowly repopulated by salmon who get lost?
    • Does California now have even less water available?

      This makes no change to the amount of water available. These dams had nothing to with water supply.

    • Why didn’t they build rapids around the dams that the salmon can jump over?
      • ...because that would solve the problem without removing the dams and then they would not be able to make much money from the project.
        • Ooh .. so clever. You posed a question then made up an answer. You could instead do some research into why the fish ladder approach that was investigated 20 years ago proved infeasible if you really were interested. Post the results when you do the work.

    • Does California now have even less water available?

      Technically there is more water available anually. Reservoirs lose a significant amount of water by evaporation due to the amount of additional water surface area they create.

      • Uh... so all the other water just runs in a loop and doesn't drain out into the oceans where it's just gone until the next rain fall?

        • Water in rivers is actually required by ecosystems running all the way down to the salt water beyond the estuaries. California captures half of all the water that falls in the state for direct human use but the other half is needed to keep the natural environment running. You can't capture all of the water just so some almond growing corporations can make a few more bucks.

          • I have always dramatically opposed growing water based cash crops in a desert. California is essentially exporting water to China via the huge number of almonds China buys from California. Madness.

            That being said, destroying all the reservoirs is also crazy. Yes, some of them are old and need serious repairs/maintenance or no longer serve their original purpose but if you listen to these people, they want to destroy all of them. Reservoirs are evil, blah blah blah.

            • Nobody wants to destroy all of the reservoirs.

              On the other hand, if we would refill aquifers we could store more water underground, where there aren't the evaporative losses, and then we wouldn't need as many surface reservoirs.

            • by nasch ( 598556 )

              I have always dramatically opposed growing water based cash crops in a desert.

              Like putting on stage plays about it, or what?

    • You know that California is like 900 miles long, and the Klamath River is at the northern bit that doesn't have water problems, right?

    • Yep, less water and less hydro power. Good job, California, getting rid of a "green" source of power.
  • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Sunday March 24, 2024 @11:52PM (#64341891)
    Everyone involved can be proud of the improvement made to a billionaire's bottom line.
    https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    The Portland-based utility — part of billionaire Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway — agreed to remove the aging dams after determining it would be less expensive than trying to bring them up to current environmental standards. The dams were used purely for power generation, not to store water for cities or farms.

    The dam will never produce so much as a watt of clean power ever again.

    • Though as expected, we did get a somewhat cool video out of it:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
      • That is a satisfying video, but a missed opportunity. Hollywood might have paid to have them use a bouncing bomb to demolish it.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mspangler ( 770054 )

      So on the one hand they are tearing out hydroelectric dams, and on the other hand they want more power for AI server farms and EVs.

      The fruits and the nuts really need to talk to each other.

      • Ooh... ignorant, arithmetic challenged, or both?

        These dams produced 0.25% of California's electricity, and in the year that they are removed California is adding almost ten times as much actual generation (not just capacity) in the form of solar power. Gosh who would have suspected that California had thought about this and had a plan?

      • So on the one hand they are tearing out hydroelectric dams, and on the other hand they want more power for AI server farms and EVs.

        I'd rather not have the server farms up here in the North where we are removing the dams; if they are going to go in the state at all they should be further south where they can have better access to solar power. As for EVs, we have refineries here in California, and the energy it takes to make gasoline can propel an EV about as far as the gasoline would an ICEV so guess where the energy is going to come from?

    • I’d rather have the wilderness as it was compared to an antique 20MW generating station.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        That's nice, but you'll get neither.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:07AM (#64342241)

      clean power

      I don't think you know what that means, which is a real achievement given the quote which immediately precedes it.

      Throwing the word "hydro" at something doesn't make it clean. Not producing CO2 doesn't make something clean. That was the reason it was decommissioned in the first place.

      All 7 dams combined produced less than 170MW at peak, and hydro dams don't operate at peak. The entire river and all dams combined produce barely 716GWh / year, which is ~80MW average, a metaphorical piss in the river of power that is California's 29GW continuous average consumption.

      There are small dispatchable gas peakers larger that this entire project, there are reasons it was deemed too costly to bring up to spec.

      • Yup and now someone else can start a small eco hydro project and dam it up all over again.
        • No. It doesn't make any sense to build hydro producing such pitiful energy for the required expense of a dam. Someone else can build something actually suitable to meeting California's power production.

          Power generation needs to be viewed holistically, it's not a case of keeping every single green electron generating device spinning without looking at the whole impacts and cost / benefits. The reason this didn't get fixed in the first place is that it wasn't cost effective to do so. It's equally not cost eff

    • This is an idiotic comment, though it got voted up to 5.

      Buffet would have profited most from just leaving the dam in place, preventing salmon spawning, and collecting the revenue from power generation. He was given a choice to fix the problem. Are you surprised he picked the cheapest way? And in fact removing the dam and returning the land to its original state is by far the best option for restoring salmon spawning. Not sure why you care so much about Buffet keeping his dams.

  • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday March 25, 2024 @06:28AM (#64342197)
    Couldnt the old dams have been retrofitted with Salmon ladders? Instead of demolishing dams and reforesting the valleys at taxpayer cost, have the power company bring the dam upto modern environmental standard at ratepayer cost
    • Fish ladders don't work.

      Fish cannons kind of work but only for paltry numbers of fish.

      The natives managed the salmon populations for ten thousand years, they know what they are doing.

    • They looked into that 20 years ago and salmon ladders would have cost more than the dam removal, and would not have worked as well even if built. These were not good sites at which to build salmon ladder (no good terrain were the artificial water channel could be built at reasonable cost).

      The power company (Warren Buffet) had the option of doing that and chose the most cost effective, and generally effective, approach. Why do you have a problem with that? Think of the dams!

  • A: Hey, we destroyed a dam!

    B: Yay!

    A: It was a hydroelectric dam!

    B: ?????

    • by Anonymous Coward
      California, Washington, Oregon and New York are in a race to out-retard each other. There are no winners and the losers are all their inhabitants.
    • Fortunately not every political persuasion requires its adherents to view everything as simplistic black and white choices, where things like hydroelectric dams must be viewed as purely good or purely bad. Of course if you treat politics as cheering for a sports team, you end up forced into absurd choices.

  • California is absolutely insane to remove hydroelectric energy generating capacity. California already has brown-outs, and existing dams could generate clean base-load electricity.
    • This isn't removing any generation capacity. These dams combined are pathetically small (given they were from the early 1900s) They represent less than 0.2% of California's average demand. For the record CA added 2GW of production capacity last year, which means if you average power produced over the year the "loss" of this production capacity will be replaced in 14 days.

      Not every hydro damn is a massive base load producer. To use a typical media report, all 7 dams combined can power less than 100 Californi

      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        This is faulty logic. These dams produced clean energy, removing them has the following effects: a) reduces baseload production in a system that is short of baseload, b) reduces clean energy generation to be replaced by emission-generating energy. This is more of the same idiocy that had Germany shut down nuclear power plants only to have to rely of coal-burning for power generation.
      • Not every hydro damn is a massive base load producer. To use a typical media report, all 7 dams combined can power less than 100 California homes.

        Where do you get this number?

        The dams removed had a generation capacity of around 160 megawatts. Name plate. The largest of them, JC Boyle, according to even an advocate for removal (Hydropower Reform Coalition) had an average annual generation of 239k megawatt hours. Figure around 11k kilowatt hours as the average annual consumption of a US home that is 22,000 homes for the one dam. Assuming the same ratio of nameplate to reality, the other dams would add power for perhaps another 12,000 homes.

        Yes, sm

        • Where do you get this number?

          I think the poster had an editing error and intended to write "less than 100,000 homes" (which is correct). As evidence is his roughly correct figure that these dams produced on the order of 0.2% of California's power. One can surmise that he probably does not think that California only has 50,000 houses.

          • Where do you get this number?

            One can surmise that he probably does not think that California only has 50,000 houses.

            I spend too much time facepalming (and attempting to provide rationality) to flat earther claims. I no longer have a bottom on what I surmise humans think.

    • California already has brown-outs, and existing dams could generate clean base-load electricity.

      Two false ideas.

      You think California "has brown-outs" because there was one day in August 2020 CALISO (the California Independent System Operators - private companies) failed to contract for sufficient power because their forecast models only used market data and not weather data. This meant they had insufficient power to supply the day of a peak heat wave, even though plenty of power was available in the west to import. And the right-wing blogosphere beats this as a drum continuously and so you assume it m

  • Hopefully, this will help restore the beaver population.
    • Hopefully, this will help restore the beaver population.

      Hopefully not. Miserable rodents.

      I trap them and nutria in a stream alongside my driveway when populations move upstream from a wetlands about a mile away. Although flooded driveway was always a very good excuse for not being able to drive into work.

  • "Yay!" - a salmon

    "Boo..." - a bluegill
  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Monday March 25, 2024 @10:13AM (#64342591) Journal

    The reservoir was around 2,200 acres, which is a smallish one in the scheme of things. For example it wasn't even large enough to make this list [wikipedia.org].

    • The reservoir was around 2,200 acres, which is a smallish one in the scheme of things. For example it wasn't even large enough to make this list [wikipedia.org].

      Which reservoir? There were three that have been drawn dawn as part of this project. Ahh, reading the article I think that number is the total surface of all the reservoirs being drawn down.

      Not making a list of the largest reservoirs in the United States is far cry from being 'smallish' when there are around 80k to 90k dams in the country. Looks like Copco Reservoir was the 71st largest in California with an actual storage capacity at 77k acre feet.

      • It's also sort of irrelevant, since the reservoirs weren't used for water - they were for power generation only.

        • It's also sort of irrelevant, since the reservoirs weren't used for water - they were for power generation only.

          Agreed. Been weird seeing one group holler about drought in the context of reservoirs not being used for water supply, and the other side claiming that area is not suffering from water supply issues. Humans.

          Although news is reporting that some locals are reporting well issues since the reservoirs were drawn down. Not sure how fast an acquifer would draw down in such a situation...

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