Restoring Salmon To Their Original Habitat -- With a Cannon 147
StartsWithABang writes Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?
just a little bigger... (Score:4, Funny)
Then we can have a shark cannon... that will attach lasers to their heads ... And put bees in their mouths.
The cold war with Russia is back baby!
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What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.
Re:just a little bigger... (Score:5, Funny)
What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.
The engineering considerations surrounding such a device seem formidable indeed. Most of the data [cmu.edu.cn] available are for humans(who, shockingly enough, have most of the medical budget dedicated to measuring delicate electrical signals through their muscle tissue); but if we assume that salmon tissue is approximately similar to human muscle, at least for the purposes of the currents and voltages a railgun implies, we can conclude that (A) the math is obnoxious. (B) fish are shitty conductors (C) fish have other obnoxious properties like 'capacitance' and non-homogenous conductivity.
Given the substantial resistance of our pisciform projectile, and the railgun's need for heroically high peak currents, supply voltage will have to be quite high, introducing additional insulation challenges, risks of air-gap breakdown between the rails, damaging arcs in other areas of the apparatus, and so on. Further issues may arise because of the projectile's non-uniform conductivity and substantial fluid content: with current flow, and resistive heating, highest along the most conductive regions, the projectile may exhibit substantial internal deformation, or even catastrophic loss of structural integrity, during acceleration or at a very early stage of flight. While it may have valuable specialty applications, this so-called 'frangible fish' effect markedly reduces effective range and almost entirely precludes survival of the projectile.
It is conceivable that advances in Aquatic-Preservation Discarding Sabot technology will allow a suitably packaged salmon to successfully traverse the accelerator rails while retaining the buoyancy necessary for continued survival by discarding the conductive jacket before entry into the target body of water. However, such developments are presently theoretical and cannot form the basis of a viable ecological dominance capability in the near term.
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Re:just a little bigger... BASS CANNON (Score:2)
Oh, stop whining about the little fry. All this time and still no mention of the BASS CANNON?
Slashdot, I am disappoint.
Re:just a little bigger... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't usually log-in to SD,
but when I do,
it is to show appreciation for awesome comments like this one.
-
Well played sir.
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That said, if anyone with a knowledge of railguns wants to calculate(or test, be sure to record) exactly how lousy a salmon would be as ammunition, I'd read the hell out of it.
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Stick 1 pointy haired MBA and 5 interns on the task of turning the pneumatic cannon into an electric fish puree launcher for fish sticks. You'll get your live fish railgun in a week and only 27x over budget.
Re:just a little bigger... (Score:4, Funny)
I was thinking more about a way to make the schoolbus obsolete.
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The UK would be much better if was sleeping with the fishes.
Pet Peeve (Score:5, Insightful)
It DOES have ongoing costs to people who live in the region, and they aren't small. While some recreational activities are created, others are lost, so that's a zero-sum. But then there are the other ecological costs: loss of fish and fisheries for many thousands of square (not to mention linear) miles of waterway. There is the loss of land behind the dam which was often (perhaps typically) farmland. And so on.
There are many other factors: wildlife typically will no longer migrate across the reservoir, leading to loss of habitat. Etc. etc.
It ain't free, and people in the region do pay for it.
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I haven't performed the calculations behind it but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's cheaper than nuclear power, once you factor in the long-term nuclear waste storage costs that are paid by the taxpayer.
Re:Pet Peeve (Score:5, Interesting)
Would these be the inflated waste storage costs paid to store the waste in the least safe and most expensive manner possible because the anti-nuclear lobby has campaigned to prevent the nuclear industry from storing the waste in the sensible places they originally intended to?
Also, hydroelectric doesn't scale. Need twice as much energy? Too bad, there's only so much flow through the river and only so many places where it can be sensibly dammed up. Meanwhile, nuclear scales nicely.
"But at least there aren't meltdowns..."
Ever seen a dam break? Look up the number of casualties due to dam breaks in the last 50 years vs the number of casualties due to nuclear meltdowns in the last 50 years. Then divide by watts.
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The number of possible sites increases considerably when you add reversible pumps to the mix - many places in Europe use hydro dams with reversible pumps to help smooth out power from other sources: use the dams for extra power during peak hours and pump the water back up with excess production from other sources (including other dams which may have excess water level to ditch) during off-peak so the dam does not need to depend entirely on local rainfall and rivers.
This sort of dual-reservoir setup is one o
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Make sure you're counting the right dams, though. A large number of dam failures have been flood-control or irrigation dams rather than hydroelectric dams. For example, of the ten deadliest dam failures since 1964, all ten involved flood-control, irrigation, or tailings impoundment dams.
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Great idea... Unless, you know, someone on the other side of that artificial mountain needs that water to survive and/or grow food everyone needs to survive.
Ah, this takes me back. (Score:4, Funny)
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There's practically no limit to how many places you could build an artificial mountain to force rainfall, and an artificial valley on an artificial plateau for the upper reservoir. And you can get more energy from the same amount of rainfall just by making the plateau taller.
Taking your infrastructure planning cues from SimCity2000 isn't the best way to arrive at practical solutions.
Re:Pet Peeve (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep - all the woes of the nuclear power industry is the anti-nuclear NIMBYS fault. They caused all of the problems if they just shut up all the problems would go away.
I wouldn't say "all", just "most". Anohter classic example is the continued operating of older, less safe plants because new ones can't get built.
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Re:Pet Peeve (Score:4, Informative)
For example, no new nuclear plant has started construction [wikipedia.org] in the US since the late 70s (the little bit of recent construction has all happened at existing nuclear plants).
Then in Japan there's the scuttling of an entire generation of nuclear plants in the decade 1995-2005 which led directly to the pre-earthquake decision [nytimes.com] (beginning of 2011) to keep the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, reactor 1 operating for another ten years rather than shutting down and decommissioning the reactor at the end of April, 2011.
Lack of options has forced these countries to make unsafe decisions, particularly to extend the lifespan of older less safe reactors.
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Erm... just to be pedantic, you didn't just observe effects.
An effect is the result of a cause. So to demonstrate "effect", I have to show an initial phenomenon, such as the cessation of nuclear plant building (while I don't demonstrate in the previous post that it's due to anti-nuclear hysteria, there's plenty of evidence such as propaganda, lawsuits, and restrictive regulations to back that up). Then I have to show a second, subsequent phenomena (here, the continued operation of old nuclear plants). Finally, I have to present an model which explains the connection
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Re: Pet Peeve (Score:3, Insightful)
Casualties from modern, western nuclear designs are easy: zero. You get more exposure from a banana than standing next to TMI during the event. And yes, the nimby folks are the source of most of the problems. We wouldn't have plants decades past their intended life using obsolete designs, and we'd be storing nuclear waste in geologically sound facilities rather than temporary storage pools.
As for scalability, you can add a reactor to a nuclear site much more easily than you can add a dam to a hydro site.
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Does a banana give off a days worth of radiation? I though TMI gave off about the amount of a days worth of radiation.
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Well... in the past decade maybe. That said, it's hydroelectric dam; people are just being lazy.
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I haven't performed the calculations behind it but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's cheaper than nuclear power, once you factor in the long-term nuclear waste storage costs that are paid by the taxpayer.
I've done the calcs. Hydropower is 1/4 the cost, all known factors included. Nothing beats it.
Re:Pet Peeve (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that nearly all the places that can be dammed have been dammed already. .
Do the calculations (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't performed the calculations behind it but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's cheaper than nuclear power
Then do the calculations before spouting off publicly and anonymously about it.
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Or you could just build some reactors like Hitachi's PRISM design that burn all the long-lived transuranics and just leave fission products that decay in a few hundred years.
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There nothing but politics keeping them from existing. This is not an engineering problem. Also, storing nuclear waste isn't a real problem. There are plenty of suitable spots.
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Pet Peeve (Score:2)
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it's cheap because it is cheap in dollars,
it's clean because using the power produces no big emissions(apart from manufacturing replacement parts).
and free.. well, it's free in the sense that you don't need to pay for the water with your foreign exports.
once it's up and running and put in a good place it's pretty ideal. that's why it's so hard to find. also the thing with salmon is tha wild salmon from the rivers wouldn't fill the supermarkets anyways - it's just a sport... a niche sport.
much better anyway
Salmon (Score:5, Insightful)
it's clean because using the power produces no big emissions(apart from manufacturing replacement parts).
Emissions are not the only type of pollution that matters. Hydro dams mess up ecosystems rather badly in a lot of cases. They might be the least worst alternative but "clean" in this case is only a relative term. They are certainly not consequence free.
also the thing with salmon is tha wild salmon from the rivers wouldn't fill the supermarkets anyways - it's just a sport... a niche sport.
Salmon serve ecological purposes beyond simply occupying space in grocery stores and providing entertainment for fishermen. Salmon are important parts of food chains and dams tend to interrupt this food chain with sometimes serious consequences.
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Beaver dams (Score:2)
Or what about the original dam builders, beavers?
The ecosystems have evolved to actually depend on beavers. Beavers existed LOOONG before humans started messing with the landscape in a big way and they actually are a benefit similar to how some types of trees actually need a periodic fire. We screwed it up when we came in and started trapping them and nearly drove them extinct at one point.
Not saying what we're doing is ideal, and our scale is usually much larger, but flooding is hardly a new experience for ecosystems..
The sort we do isn't really comparable in most cases to any sort of natural process. There is a huge difference between a natural dam and one of our hydro-electric d
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canada/7676300/Worlds-biggest-beaver-dam-can-be-seen-from-space.html [telegraph.co.uk]
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Fish can go over most anything. Some/most catfish can even walk over land. I've seen a new glacial lake, teeming with little fishes the very next year after it was created. I have seen hundreds of little fishes in a rock pool in a wadi in the middle of the Arabian desert, completely isolated, but somehow they got there and the fish in the next valey are the same, even though they are separated by hundreds of kilometers of dry rivers, mountains and salty sea water on the bottom end. Fish go upstream thro
Re:Pet Peeve (Score:5, Informative)
When ducks suddenly emerge from a pond covered with duck-weed, I have twice seen these little plants adhering to their backs; and it has happened to me, in removing a little duck-weed from one aquarium to another, that I have unintentionally stocked the one with fresh-water shells from the other. But another agency is perhaps more effectual: I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium, where many ova of fresh-water shells were hatching; and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken out of the water they could not be jarred off, though at a somewhat more advanced age they would voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched molluscs, though aquatic in their nature, survived on the duck's feet, in damp air, from twelve to twenty hours; and in this length of time a duck or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles, and if blown across the sea to an oceanic island, or to any other distant point, would be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet.
the feet of a duck (Score:3)
I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium
From these humblest origins of freight -- where the simple brain of a duck determines terminus loci -- human kind has leveraged the Duck Foot Apparatus into a vast global network with computer-optimized logistics management. Producers and shippers of commodities no longer need to wait until they are stepped on or eaten by a duck. This confers numerous advantages for cargo weight and scheduling and the ability to choose destination.
Early inventors believed you merely needed to graft duck feet onto Medieval [1stdibs.com]
Fish cannot adapt that fast (Score:2)
Fish can go over most anything.
Some can in some cases but be careful about generalizing. Most fish cannot easily adapt to the sudden appearance of a dam blocking the entire river nor can the other parts of the food chain that depend on the fish. These are ecosystems that developed over thousands/millions of years. Nature can adapt in time but it often does not happen overnight or without consequence.
Somehow they went up and over Niagara falls, Victoria falls and many other enormous falls.
Why do you presume they went over the falls? More likely the waterways were joined in some other way once upon a time. While fish can
But it's safe! (Score:5, Informative)
But Hydroelectric is incredibly safe when you look at all other forms of energy production. It certainly has never displaced as many people or killed as many people as nuclear.
Oh wait! [wikipedia.org]
The halo effect describes cognitive bias people have about others based on an impression. It applies to industry just as much as it applies to people. Look at the full lifecycle cost of anything and nothing is really without issues, especially hydroelectric power which currently wins top prize as worst accident by death toll ever though the Chinese government list it as a natural disaster.
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The dam failures that you linked to were primarily caused by a typhoon that dumped over a meter of water in the area in less than 24 hours. It was pretty clearly a natural disaster that they weren't prepared for.
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Are you suggesting that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami were somehow not natural disasters?
Or are you suggesting that this was a disaster that couldn't have been prepared for, despite the fact that TEPCO had been warned of the possibility years before? They dismissed the prediction as an unrealistic scenario [wikipedia.org] and literally didn't bother preparing for it, so yeah... they were unprepared.
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Are you suggesting that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami were somehow not natural disasters?
Back at you. I don't see any reason I need to answer that any more than you do. One could also read my post.
Or are you suggesting that this was a disaster that couldn't have been prepared for, despite the fact that TEPCO had been warned of the possibility years before? They dismissed the prediction as an unrealistic scenario and literally didn't bother preparing for it, so yeah... they were unprepared.
But they weren't unprepared for a more or less uncontrolled meltdown. When things fail hard, the planners of a system can still steer how the system fails.
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Back at you. I don't see any reason I need to answer that any more than you do. One could also read my post.
I'm happy to go on record as saying that earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons (and they damage they cause) are natural disasters. I'll even go so far as to say that only an idiot would argue otherwise.
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Re:But it's safe! (Score:4, Interesting)
If a nuclear plant failed due to a natural event that caused a massive amount of water to accumulate in one area, people would be calling for all nuclear plants of every design to be dismantled, and would be saying that nuclear is unsafe.
I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. Banqaio was a massive disaster, killing an estimated 171,000 people, and making millions homeless. Yet we don't see calls to dismantle all dams, or that dams are inherently unsafe.
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Were you trying to reply to some other comment? I said nothing about dismantling dams or nuclear reactors.
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No you merely demonstrated what I was saying, that people have a cognitive bias that gives "green" projects a thumbs up while holding other projects heavily accountable for even externally related issues, such as an earthquake and a tsunami knocking down a nuclear reactor. But it's ok that a dam didn't hold water right?
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Nice try but the cause of a dam failure is NEVER water. That is the primary engineering case. It's like saying the cause of a bridge failure is a car driving over it, or the cause of a building falling down is that it contained office workers.
Dams are designed to safely spill floodwaters.
Actually this is another example of the halo effect. Fukushima was negligence because they didn't account for a large than normal tsunami, but Banqaio was a natural disaster? Hell no.
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It's almost as if anything with the capability to generate or store huge amount of energy also has the potential to unleash that energy in unpleasant ways.
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This is about the most insightful comment I've ever seen from an AC. It's right on the money.
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While some recreational activities are created,
Salmon skeet-shooting?
As far as economists see it (Score:1)
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Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Because social costs happen to be whatever numbers you decide to pull out of your ass that day. But even if we were to somehow find a valid and objective means to calculate such social costs, you woul
Know your topic before giving a lecture (Score:2)
A final year undergraduate subject entitled precisely that is where I came to such a sad realisation, later reinforced when working in a mechanical engineering university department that shared a building with business studies and later again working on various projects on private enterprise.
It's the task of the engineer to quantify such costs to avoid the not much more than teenage financial "wizards" going all Enron on you with their simplistic bullshit and delib
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A final year undergraduate subject entitled precisely that is where I came to such a sad realisation, later reinforced when working in a mechanical engineering university department that shared a building with business studies and later again working on various projects on private enterprise.
Then your ignorance of the subject is inexcusable.
It's a truly spectacular reading comprehension failure if you think I am being critical of "Jane Q. Public" in any way.
I'll accept that then.
I still don't appreciate your slam of economics, ignoring a whole field of knowledge just because it doesn't fit your current argument. Yes, it's not a pretty field. Economics has the enormous problem that most of what it's about is highly valuable to a lot of people with the ability to buy lots of credentialled opinion. As a result, with stakes that high, we see a lot of corruption of the field for gain or ideology. I don't deny tha
Molehill to mountain (Score:2)
A specific type of situation where a field of knowledge is dumbed down to almost no knowledge at all is not an example of "ignoring a whole field of knowledge".
I suggest you reply to my posts instead of to your own baggage.
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A specific type of situation where a field of knowledge is dumbed down to almost no knowledge at all is not an example of "ignoring a whole field of knowledge".
Sounds exactly like ignoring to me. So why are you "dumbing down" economics to "almost no knowledge at all"? Or are the pet economists of the pushers of large projects forcing you to dumb down your knowledge of economics?
And really the assertion makes no sense in other ways. For example, if I oversimplify the theory of gravity (say to support my assertion that the Earth is flat), that doesn't invalidate Newtonian mechanics or general relativity. So why should an oversimplified, or even merely terrible ex
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No it's specific versus general. We are dealing with two different topics here.
The topic I'm discussing is the unrealistic figures produced by people who call themselves economists (despite showing "almost no knowledge at all") with respect to energy projects as complained about by the post above.
The topic you appear to be discussing is about pretending that specific point is a general case so that you can build a large enough strawman in my name to be easy to attack.
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I recall you didn't actually provide any such qualifier in the statement that kicked off this little thread. "As far as economists see it, it is free." That's a pretty broad brush. But now, you now claim you referred to "economists" who aren't actually economists, but whom you choose to cal
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But of course you didn't look for context - merely key words you could use as an excuse for some petty attempt at bullying. How childish, just like your "poo-flinging" thing you keep on bringing up.
Try meeting an actual economist sometime (Score:2)
As far as economists see it, it is free.
You apparently don't know any actual economists. I do and I assure you they would declare the above statement to be nonsense. So would the engineers, financiers, and accountants who actually work on these sorts of projects.
Something of high value that lasts a long time just does not plug sensibly into their compound interest formula and boggles their tiny minds.
Well since you are so damn smart why don't you show them how it is done and collect your Nobel prize.
Also quantifying social costs is too damn hard for just about anyone to work out so they assume such things do not exist.
Never mind that economists do this all the time. You would know that had you actually bothered to look.
Try looking at recent history (Score:2)
Of course it could be said that such people are not "real" economists, they are just pointless "yes" men, but those pushing the large projects call them economists.
An especially spectacular failure was a cull of millions of sheep on the suggestion
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It DOES have ongoing costs to people who live in the region, and they aren't small.
I think this depends a lot on the location, the size of the dam, and what was there before. In many cases you are
creating a lake where nothing of significant value existed before. A community springs up around the lake and
many times a state park with protected wildlife areas surrounds the lake too. In many cases the area is not
only better for people but it's better for the wildlife too.
But then there are the other ecological costs: loss of fish and fisheries for many thousands of square (not to mention linear) miles of waterway.
I would have to see some stats on that. The places I know that have dams have been a boom to fish populations.
There are
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"people in the region do pay for it"
I think you mean the first generation of people during/after construction. I live a 10 minute walk away from a water system capped by 2 70+ year old dams and have never once had them have an adverse effect on my life. In fact, looking at the electricity rates for our friends to the south in the US, it seems the American national average cost of electricity is 12.97 cents/kwh. Because of these dams and others like them in my province, I pay about half of that. And the
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They are pussies (Score:5, Funny)
Can't they just evolve and grow legs to hike up? We did it, dammit!
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Some catfish (barbers) can walk many meters over dry land looking for the next pool.
A much better use (Score:3, Funny)
Use the cannon to shoot them into an oven so I can enjoy salmon meals much easier, goddammit.
Shoot, it's worth a try (Score:5, Funny)
Q: What did the fish say when it bumped into a concrete wall?
A: Dam!
Father's Day Story? (Score:1)
Next step (Score:2)
So when do we get the pneumatic people movers, a la Futurama?
I'm also wondering if the guys who came up with this got the idea from the show.
Super Mario Bros (Score:2)
A fish cannon sounds like a idea Nintendo Super Mario Bros game idea.
It's not just a fish cannon. (Score:5, Funny)
It's an eagle entertainment device.
Re:It's not just a fish cannon. (Score:5, Funny)
This bears watching to see what happens.
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This bears watching to see what happens.
*Grabs popcorn* This otter be good.
Better Links (Score:4, Informative)
The original article:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8... [theverge.com]
Whooshh Innovations [whooshh.com]
Doubt it would work (Score:2)
Incidentally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slime loss / long term survival (Score:2)
I would think they need to do more testing. Sure it looks cool and they appear to survive because we see them swimming afterwards. However, not all fish can tolerate a lot of handling and if they lose too much of their slimy outer coating they don't do so well.
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ummm.... (Score:3)
Hydroelectric dams are "green" now?!?! Then it goes on to describe the devastation they cause to the environment up and down the river?
that gets the salmon upstream... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that you kill just as large a percentage on the downstream trip, largely due to dissolved gas bubbles in their flesh due to dramatic pressure changes. So even if you can get the adult salmon upstream to spawn, the baby salmon can't survive the downstream trip because they get the bends.
Even if they get past all of the dams, they have to go past the mildly radioactive section around Hanford and then the rather polluted Columbia River Estuary below Bonneville Dam.
Re:that gets the salmon upstream... (Score:5, Informative)
A Fish Cannon? (Score:1)
Science is always better... (Score:3, Funny)
Just one step closer... (Score:2)
The Joker's next weapon: Salmon Cannon (Score:2)
Slaps you in the face with a fish; leaves a nasty sting and smell.
Can't let the Russians get ahead of us on this! (Score:2)
So how does it actually work? (Score:2)
What a lousy article.
I've read that a vacuum sucks the fish into the tube, and then air pressure propels them along the tube, but how the hell is that achieved?
How do you get a vacuum at the start and then pressure all the way up?
tourist attraction (Score:2)
I don't know if this could be practical, but I bet it'd be fun to watch.
Hey ma! Here comes another one!
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Ask your teacher about the google.