And in “tell Us Something we Didn’t Already Know” news.
Yes, AND, Nuclear is also cheaper in cost of human lives per gigawatt hour!
EVEN SOLAR AND WIND KILL MORE PEOPLE PER GIGAWATT HOUR THAN NUCLEAR.
(Hydro admittedly kills less people per GWh than nuclear, though - but not every place has that option.)
Hydro causes a whole host of other issues though. It requires changing the environment in a very direct way. There are methods to reduce the issues, like fish ladders and things like that, but it’s an immediate shift of an area from a running river to essentially a lake with a waterfall.
And in order for hydro’s effects to be most easy to curtail, you need very specific terrain topology - such as where I live, in the Springfield area of Massachusetts, there’s a hydroelectric dam on the Connecticut River in South Hadley/Holyoke (the two sides of the river at that section):
The dam was built where there were natural falls. So the dam leveraged the fact that the change in water elevation was natural and already extant prior to the dam’s existence. They’ve had a fish elevator system for longer than I’ve been alive, too. Rather than changing how the hydrological system worked in the area, the dam stabilized it upstream such that the water level up the Connecticut River from there is more consistent than it used to be before - whenever there’s more water than usual, the dam can increase spill rate.
The city of chicopee, across the river from holyoke and just north of springfield, also has a hydroelectric dam, also built where there were natural falls. This region is pretty good for stuff like that, and our electrical supply is much hardier as a result!
