It’s quite a construction. I’m from the Great Plains, and was not real sympathetic to the Big Dams. Living up here, I’ve changed opinions.
What I remain sad about is the effect on native peoples and the salmon fisheries closely tied to them. I can say, however, that the native peoples have maintained their individual cultures, have found inventive ways—the casinos, etc—that provide finance, and while it was a terrible thing for their way of life, they do carry on in their individual identities, and have a respected voice in local life. It’s a case of —wish the land hadn’t been taken, wish the salmon still ran free in the Columbia, but— granted the direction of modern civilization, worse could have happened, worse power sources, worse industries, worse pollution.
And where the dam is sited, which is on the course of an ancient flood, it’s not as disruptive as it could have been: Lake Roosevelt, which holds water backed up, is more like a broadened river clear to Canada and into it, rather than a big fat lake spreading outward.
The surrounding area was pretty well high plains desert and still is in places. The water gets distributed upward by pumps into a canal and lake that supply water to irrigation, creating a massively fertile farmland, orchards, etc, and the power the dam generates reaches all over the NW, and down to California, with no smokestacks, no air pollution from the power source itself. And fierce laws likewise went into place to protect the salmon in natural streams. You cannot mess with those or you are in serious trouble. The sky stays blue, and the power comes by water running downhill. The power is also distributed very widely—and keeps rates low. It’s one of the cleaner means of doing several massive jobs—food and power at once. A day’s drive away, in Wyoming, sits a coalfired power plant that is fed by some of the longest trains I have ever seen on the rails, carrying coal to that plant. It is, for what it is, not belching black smoke. It seems to emit steam. But that’s a lot of mining, a lot of coal. I’d like to know how that one operates. But I think I prefer taking advantage of gravity.
I still have my reservations about Hoover Dam, which spends an awful lot of energy toward the lights of Las Vegas, about which I also have reservations, but Grand Coulee has done pretty ‘dam’ well for a project built by the relief efforts of the Great Depression, and it STILL has expansion capability: the newest bank of its turbines produces 60% of the energy the dam outputs. If they someday DO replace the two original arrays of turbines, it could be more productive than it is.
It’s not the only power-producing dam in the system. There are dams on the Snake as well and on some other rivers of which I don’t know the names. But the forests up here still stand and the salmon still exist, alongside major cities, so as civilization goes, it sits easier on the landscape than some solutions.
Windmills are also blossoming up here, along ridges that get a lot of wind, which is another way of using what flows naturally. And believe me, when wind blows across the Palouse, or down the Columbia Gorge, it is potent.
Atomic energy hasn’t fared so well here: Washington, volcanically active, and with quakes, has the Hanford reactors, which figured in early atomic power development. Notoriously so. It’s old, it was where they learned a lot of things they now know better than to do, and it’s a mess. There are local jokes about glowing sagebrush and strange rabbits, and keeping Hanford safe is kind of an ongoing effort—a lot of cleanup to do there. So it was not cost-effective, especially in the mop-up.
An interesting trip. I will say—don’t eat IN Grand Coulee township: eat on the south side of the dam. Or eat beforehand. Or pack a picnic lunch. But it is an interesting visit.
In 1913, Western Ohio suffered some pretty massive floods. There are markers in Dayton, OH, that show the level of water from the Great Miami and Mad Rivers. After that, the Miami Conservancy District was set up and constructed 5 dams, some of earthworks, others of concrete. None of the dams are used for electric power generation, they predate that technology, and do not have floodgates anyway. They aren’t used so much to dam up the rivers, as to hold back excessive amounts of water flowing during flood times. That prevents the lands downstream from being flooded as well, since many areas of Dayton are lower than others, and significant flooding would do a lot of damage to properties in those areas. I live up on the higher levels of the plain, and in my city, I live on top of a hill on the opposite side of town from the river. About 25 years ago, the Great Miami flooded again, and required the installation of flood walls with pumping stations at intervals along the walls. There’s a dam in our southwest corner of Shelby County, OH, called Lockington, that is the same design as the 5 dams in Dayton, it’s open, but it also has sluice gates on a spillway. This dam was used for holding back waters from Loramie Creek, flowing from Loramie Lake (an artificial lake, btw) and to supply water for the Miami-Erie Canal, which ran through town. There are locks from the old canal still in existence, just a little further south of the dam, near Piqua, OH. I grew up about 3 blocks from where the canal used to run through town, and there are traces of the old canal bed still visible. We have a channel of water from the Great Miami River that diverges east of the city and was used to provide feedwater to the canal, as well, having earned the name, Canal Feeder (can’t claim originality).
I was born and raised in LA. There wouldn’t have been an LA without Boulder Dam. (Yes, I know people joke about LA, and Vegas, but don’t forget, they are what we made them!)
And about Hanford, the biggest problem there was people ignoring something I learned back in Chemistry 1: Water, all alone, by itself, is one of the most corrosive liquids in the Universe. That waste should have been dried to solids and made into vitreous (glassified) bricks from the get go.
Mother Nature’s Original Cleaning Fluid; the Dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide
The going joke in Chemistry class was whether intelligent life could possible evolve in an environment of corrosive water. 😉
To reinforce what Paul said, I was talking to my plumber as he replaced the valves feeding my washer. In a <Fe>brilliant</Fe> design, the water from the A/C drops into the washer drain which is between the hot and cold valves. A/C condensation is distilled water, utterly pure, and my plumber said nothing could protect the valves from it. So, I extended the tube so the distilled water is release fully down the drain instead of splashing on the valves.
As far as Vegas and Hoover Dam, Forbes in early 2007 estimated, “The city demands 5,600 megawatts on a summer day. By 2015 that’s expected to hit 8,000.” I beg to doubt the 2015 estimate because of the effects of the financial crisis. Hoover can produce 2080 MW, according to Wikipedia, but if I’ve done the math right, it averages 480 MW day and night. It has nineteen turbines, so it can vary its output according to need. On the other hand, fewer larger turbines might be more efficient.
A friend collected antiques. For some unknown reason, he picked up something that might have been an alternate use of the wire of a wire hanger. It had a small loop, where you might put a screw to anchor it, then spiraled in decoratively, flat, about 5″ in diameter, and ended with an L sticking out, the top of the L sharpened. My friend had no idea what it was. Imagine you’re in a 1930s or earlier office. The window is open for cooling and breezes tend to disrupt your papers. You use paperweights, of course, but they won’t get papers to stick on a wall. A spindle will, as in, “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” He had a wall-mount spindle: stick the papers on the spike.
Los Angeles would have been around with or without Hoover Dam. LA settled from the coast inland. The LA area has a lot of oil, still being exploited. But even without oil and air conditioning it would be there. LA is the way it is because of cheap power, but it would be just as viable, near the coast, air-cooled. The movie industry started before air conditioning, as did shipping and aerospace. LA hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 (for the first time), pre-A/C. Many servicemen, exposed to LA during WWII, settled in and around LA after; the servicemen were often not air conditioned.
Still, it would be nice if we stopped, everywhere, building greenhouse skyscrapers which we then cool electrically. It’s quite a waste of money, other considerations aside.
@Walt It’s not the AC!!! (I’ve never lived in a house with AC.) It’s drinking water! (And other household purposes.) It drank the Los Angeles river dry, the San Gabriel, and then it bought up all the water rights in the Inyo Valley, which Mulholland piped to LA, and it still wasn’t enough. In the 70’s I called and asked, and the wastewater treatment plant between Playa del Rey and Manhattan Beach was pumping 1 billion liters of treated water out into Santa Monica Bay, and there was another plant near Long Beach that pumped a like amount off White Point, south of San Pedro.
They overran the capacity of the LA river back around 1880. (It still has water in it – but it’s seasonal, just a little in the summer. Enough to support water birds all year round, though.)
They’re getting into groundwater recharge from the newer treatment plants, too. (Tillman uses some of its outflow to feed the river.)
The Los Angeles River has, in my lifetime, been mostly a local joke. Most non-native Angeleños don’t know it exists. They know that concrete ditch from east of downtown to Long Beach and its extension through North Hollywood and Encino as flood control–that they have to fish someone out of every few years. That’s been its function.
Kayaking trips are offered on part of it now, in the summer, especially along the natural-bottom area.
They’re restoring the LA river bit by bit, not that it’s going to be rivaling the Mississippi. It should be a nice string of parks, though. My local creek has been left largely in its natural state from me to the sea; inland it links a string of parks. Laguna Creek is very nice, sheltered by the foothills; the city of Laguna Beach has fought tooth and nail to protect it.
Agriculture uses 80% of the water in California, but it’s only 2% of the economy; the central valley has lowered a foot from all the water farmers have removed. As the earliest state founded west of the Rockies we have “senior rights” to the Colorado River water. That said, we do the same thing with water as power: pretend it’s unlimited and waste it. I’ve only half joked that all the sewers go the wrong way: instead of ending in the ocean, they should end in a desert septic tank, where the waste would be sterilized by the heat and the water would be returned to the water table.
The new roof was finished as of the 23rd, and we got a nice little afternoon of soft rain to test it today. No leaks!! Next step, installing the solar panels. We expect to be online within the next couple of weeks.
Yay!
What’s wrong with the food in Grand Coulee township?
They cater to desperate tourists?
The Grand Coulee food wasn’t bad, as in, inedible, but it was underspiced. Bacon cheeseburger: processed cheese square, very thin hamburger patty on untoasted bun with overcooked bacon, no condiment, lettuce, tomato, pickle on the side. (They did get ‘no onion’ right.) And the French fries had been a potato once, but they were not crisp. Jane’s chef salad was pretty large pieces of iceberg lettuce with a bad honey mustard (the ranch dressing was safe), slices of this and that and a piece of diced turkey lunch meat. It was what I call school cafeteria food, wholesome enough. Adequate, but I looked with more interest on the Mexican restaurant on the other side of the bridge. Note: the gift shop owner told us the hamburger restaurant was ‘the best in town.’ It was sort of the only restaurant in town. I will say, at least they didn’t use meat tenderizer.
When I drove down to Shejicon IV I went through Grand Coulee because I’d always wanted to see the dam. [Dam(n)! BIG!] I’ll probably come the same way for Shejicon V, but I’ll try to park in town somewhere and walk over because I think the best view of the dam straight on would be from the bridge. From the north you do come upon Grand Coulee rather suddenly.
The interpretive centre at the generating station was well done, but I didn’t give it proper attention. I was more interested in stretching my legs and finding the restroom after a long bit of driving.
I’ll maybe do it again this year, so thanks for the restaurant warning.
A few years ago when we were up thereafter at a great little place in Electric City called the Fusion Cafewhich lookalike repurposed gas station. Not typical burger fare, but some interesting sandwiches. Unfortunately, the dam cascaded, so no tours. Would highly recommended the capricious ever paperback up there
Omg. Autocorrect is wretched. The Fusion Cafe had really good food, a really nice southwestern chicken salad, some very innovative sandwiches. And the dam had not cascaded, it was closed for some reason. But we got some fun pictures including guys way up in the transmission tower getting something delivered by helicopter — scary with a helicopter dangling a long line and all those wires.