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Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

spokesman.com

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Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#51

Post by Stevvo »

igorstellar wrote: post #47
tima101 wrote: post #45

I live not far from where Columbia river comes out to US from Canada, in US portion of Selkirk Mountains. This is north of Coulee Dam. It's good that salmon can come into this area but smelter from Trail, BC has been polluting upper Columbia river for about hundred years. With chemicals and smelter sludge. Fish is not edible, sand is black from sludge. Salmon may have reached upper Columbia river, but water in that p…

How nuclear waste leaves power plant? I always was under impression the core is heavily isolated and water is just cooling or used for turbines.

That's how it should work, but there have been ~15 or so reactors built there, with many of them in the 40s and 50s before there was adequate safety.

There was also the issue of "waste" being removed from those reactors for processing into more than 60,000 weapons.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#52

Post by scottlamb »

AareyBaba wrote: post #50
igorstellar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How nuclear waste leaves power plant? I always was under impression the core is heavily isolated and water is just cooling or used for turbines.

Cleaning Up the Cold War’s Nuclear Legacy at Hanford https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/a-glass-nightma... "During Hanford’s plutonium-production heyday, workers discharged some 1.7 trillion liters of waste liquids into soil disposal sites, which developed into vast underground plumes of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogens hexavalent chromium and carbon tetrachloride [PDF], that infiltrated aquifers.…

Interesting that the two chemicals mentioned in that quote aren't radioactive. Carbon tetrachloride apparently was once used as a household spot cleaner, [1] so I think it's fair to say folks who dealt with nuclear waste would have been relatively unconcerned with carbon tetrachloride.

Of course, knowing what we do now, they absolutely are dangerous. It's horrible they've leaked into the aquifer. Reminds me of the trichloroethylene plumes in Silicon Valley. Also a solvent once considered pretty benign, now known to be a carcinogen. (And actually linked to quite a few cancer cases I believe, unlike many chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.")

[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/phs.asp?id=194&tid=35#:~:text=....

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#53

Post by soperj »

oppenh3imer wrote: post #36
lumberingjack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chop down 98% of american indigenous forests to make room for homes, drain all the wetlands in socal for gold miners. But all no we can't have clean power cus of some fishis that my tribe that originally owned that land didn't even care about.

We have programs for both reforestation and for wetland preservation. With any conservation proposal, one must weigh the pros and cons. In this case it is true that hydropower is cheap and clean. However, the negative externality of destroying the salmon run is much more than "some fishis" that some Indian tribes cared about. Aboriginal annual salmon catches have been estimated at over 10 million pounds for year. On…

It's not necessarily clean either. Depending on what was flooded, if there's any forest involved it can be much worse in terms of GHGs than the equivalent coal plant because of decaying plant matter.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#54

Post by bb88 »

brewdad wrote: post #46
bb88 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salmon are used as food sources for humans and for wildlife. The stronger the salmon are, the stronger the ecology of the PNW will be. Not all dams that are blocking salmon runs in the PNW are used for hydro power, or for flood control for that matter.

Ok, I'll bite. If a dam isn't being used for hydro power, nor for flood control, what is it being used for? I'm assuming a dam that creates a reservoir for water storage is considered flood control but perhaps you are not.

"run-of-river" dams to provide easier access for barges.

See this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540540

So the question is are we okay with converting barge traffic to rail traffic? Probably. That's the way things are transported across the rest of the country.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#55

Post by fractallyte »

macinjosh wrote: post #41

I don't really care. Environmentalists will never happy until the world's population is so low that they feel like 'nature' is unaffected by humans. In reality that means they want the world to themselves and anyone with any other interests to be plant fertilizer. There haven't been a specific kind of fish there for _eighty_ years and it hasn't impacted human life so why do we need to spend tax dollars to have them t…

Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p

There are nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.

Can you see the disparity?

And here is a slice of the result: https://xkcd.com/1338/

If you feel like learning more about „The Great Forgetting“, read this: The Once and Future World, by J B MacKinnon (http://jbmackinnon.com/books.html). Contact me if you want the ebook.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#56

Post by mb7733 »

macinjosh wrote: post #41

I don't really care. Environmentalists will never happy until the world's population is so low that they feel like 'nature' is unaffected by humans. In reality that means they want the world to themselves and anyone with any other interests to be plant fertilizer. There haven't been a specific kind of fish there for _eighty_ years and it hasn't impacted human life so why do we need to spend tax dollars to have them t…

Who are you responding to? Nobody in the article or the comments is advocating for reducing the human population.

Besides that, it's obviously not zero sum. Increasing the salmon population does not decrease the human population. Arguably, in the long run, what is good for the salmon is also good for the human.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#57

Post by steve_adams_86 »

evmar wrote: post #3

I grew up in a small town in the PNW that has a yearly salmon festival, and it wasn't until a post from HN[1] that I learned/realized that the whole system of "fish hatcheries" that my town celebrated is kind of a horrible bandaid over the ecological disaster we perpetrated. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298472 , definitely worth a read if you care about salmon

There is a documentary about this as well (https://youtu.be/XdNJ0JAwT7I), which I thought was fascinating. I learned from this and one other (I’ve forgotten the name) that the salmon likely suffer far less from overfishing than most people believe. Perhaps what happened is the primary population pressures occurred until fishing pressure became noticeable. At that point people pointed their fingers to the most obvious cause of salmon deaths and missed the ones we’re only recently becoming more broadly aware of.

Not to say fishing doesn’t make a difference. It’s just not the only problem. Fish farm research was suppressed by the Canadian government which showed that the farms were spreading vast amounts of disease very consistently, for example. One disease acted so quickly that the fish would die before they could spawn. Fortunately the research surfaced eventually and farms are largely being shut down, but these farms have been operating for decades.

It’s a very complex and frightening problem. I’m glad we’re making progress in understanding it better.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#58

Post by bobthepanda »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #9
killjoywashere wrote: post #5

Readers may also find this review of methods of building salmon-friendly dams interesting: https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/mf...

We must learn to live with hydro power and dams. It’s such an incredible and clean source of energy. It’s low maintenance and has a high duty cycle, with only nuclear being a more consistent. Dams are also how many parts of the US irrigate crops for our food.

Dams may become less reliable in coming years as climate change makes droughts more frequent and with worse severity.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#59

Post by thaumasiotes »

burtonator wrote: post #7
ficklepickle wrote: post #2

It's nice and all, but it is unlikely to lead to a returning salmon population. Even if the spawn make it through the dams, they won't be able to come back when they reach spawning age. They need to invest tons of money in salmon ladders and naturalization, for example, like we are doing in BC. That would be quite the project for the Grand Coulee dam, as I remember it being quite large. Hopefully this is the first st…

If native populations are going to come back and be sustainable we have to tear down the damns. I realize that causes other political issues but that's the only way we're going to have native populations. I'm an avid fisherman and really LOVE fish. They're amazing animals. Fisherman have a connection to nature that just can't be appreciated unless you have spent significant time on the water. Fish are SMART, they're…

> I once had a large trout swim UP a (short, about 4') waterfall with my lure in his mouth and I could SEE him swimming up it as if it were just normal water.

This would be much like the scene in The Hobbit with Legolas successfully gaining elevation by climbing up free-falling rubble.

Re: Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

#60

Post by i_am_proteus »

igorstellar wrote: post #47
tima101 wrote: post #45

I live not far from where Columbia river comes out to US from Canada, in US portion of Selkirk Mountains. This is north of Coulee Dam. It's good that salmon can come into this area but smelter from Trail, BC has been polluting upper Columbia river for about hundred years. With chemicals and smelter sludge. Fish is not edible, sand is black from sludge. Salmon may have reached upper Columbia river, but water in that p…

How nuclear waste leaves power plant? I always was under impression the core is heavily isolated and water is just cooling or used for turbines.

The waste is leftover from cold-war-era plutonium production for nuclear weapons.
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