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Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

>So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!

It is a relief that Environmentalists have decided that hydro counts as "renewable" energy! When I was in school, hydro was considered really bad for the environment, and projects like the Hoover dam and Yangzie River dam were "not helping"

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They certainly can be disastrous in ecological terms, and will disrupt all biotopes along the concerned water flows.

But it's extremely renewable none the less.

Its local environmental damage versus global environmental gains

Same as nuclear, right?

No, you don't have to change any ecosystems to build a NPP. No idea why you would think that in the first place really.

To be clear, I'm in favor of nuclear, but people attack it saying it does change the local ecosystem (heating up water for cooling and pumping the warm water into rivers, and of course the nuclear waste).

Here we just had someone say that hydro is fine because it only changes the local ecosystem so I jumped on that line of reasoning. I would argue with you that nuclear changes the local ecosystem way, way less than a dam does and so it's even better.

I wasn't saying its fine, I was saying it was a tradeoff. And I wasn't making an argument about Nuclear, either.

Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.

Many environmentalists seem completely unwilling to acknowledge the concept of tradeoffs. Unless a solution is 100% perfect in every way, they reject it. Or at least, the committees and infighting become so protracted that they cannot agree no a solution. This is true of our world today. We have limited resources with which to address things like pollution and emissions. We should be focusing on the most impactful changes first, posing the fewest costs. Nothing has zero cost.

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