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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Another rarely discussed downside of hydropower is that it is extremely environmentally and socially destructive. Damming a river basically destroys its ecosystem. Dams also often flood very large areas, requiring people to evacuate and destroying anything that was there, natural or manmade.

For example, the Itaipu Dam:

When construction of the dam began, approximately 10,000 families living beside the Paraná River were displaced because of construction. (...) The world's largest waterfall by volume, the Guaíra Falls, was inundated by the newly formed Itaipu reservoir. The Brazilian government later liquidated the Guaíra Falls National Park. (...) The Guaíra Falls was an effective barrier that separated freshwater species in the upper Paraná basin (with its many endemics) from species found below it, and the two are recognized as different ecoregions.[18] After the falls disappeared, many species formerly restricted to one of these areas have been able to invade the other, causing problems typically associated with introduced species. For example, more than 30 fish species that formerly were restricted to the region below the falls have been able to invade the region above.

The construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt flooded 5,250 km^2 and resulted in the relocation of 100,000 to 120,000 people and 22 Ancient Egyptian monuments.

For comparison, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has an area of 2,600 km^2. That is to say, the Aswan Dam rendered uninhabitable twice as much land as the Chernobyl disaster.

That's just one of many reservoirs all over the world. Looking at this list, if we exclude the reservoirs that resulted from the enlargement of pre-existing lakes and consider only the ones that are completely artificial, there are 15 reservoirs which individually rendered uninhabitable more land than the Chernobyl disaster. The total amount of land flooded by dams is many times greater than the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I don't have the exact figures, but the number of people displaced by dams is certainly also much larger than the number of people who were evacuated from the Chernobyl area.

Don't forget that this is a normal and accepted part of building hydropower, whereas the Chernobyl disaster was a one-time event that resulted from a combination of poor Soviet design and human error. If we considered the failures of dams, we'd get a death toll much larger than any estimate for Chernobyl.

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