from Hacker News

Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years

by shartshooter on 12/25/20, 10:13 PM with 69 comments

• by tima101 on 12/26/20, 5:54 AM

  I live not far from where Columbia river comes out to US from Canada, in US portion of Selkirk Mountains. This is north of Coulee Dam.

  It's good that salmon can come into this area but smelter from Trail, BC has been polluting upper Columbia river for about hundred years. With chemicals and smelter sludge. Fish is not edible, sand is black from sludge.

  Salmon may have reached upper Columbia river, but water in that part of the river is heavily polluted.

  And south of Coulee Dam, there is storage of nuclear waste, just north of Richmond, WA - Hanford site. Nuclear waste already leaks into Columbia river, north of Tri-Cities area.

  So in my opinion, human created disasters in the Columbia river, rank in this order: nuclear waste at Hanford site > smelter at Trail, BC > Dams without passage for fish.

  Sorry for typos, typing from phone.

• by evmar on 12/25/20, 11:48 PM

  I grew up in a small town in the PNW that has a yearly salmon festival, and it wasn't until a post from HN[1] that I learned/realized that the whole system of "fish hatcheries" that my town celebrated is kind of a horrible bandaid over the ecological disaster we perpetrated.

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298472 , definitely worth a read if you care about salmon

• by killjoywashere on 12/26/20, 12:06 AM

  Readers may also find this review of methods of building salmon-friendly dams interesting:

  https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/mf...

• by merb on 12/26/20, 1:08 AM

  I was raised in a small german village near the rhine. which also has a big project to reintroduce salmon: https://www.salmoncomeback.org/ and https://www.iksr.org/en/icpr/rhine-2020/salmon-2020 as far as I know salmon was back since 2016 in these regions which was a huge breaktrough.

• by waynecochran on 12/25/20, 11:56 PM

  That means those salmon have to make there way thru about 10 or 11 dams!

  Dams provide so many good things (clean energy, passable water, flood protection, ...). If the salmon can spawn that would be ideal!

• by ed25519FUUU on 12/26/20, 12:41 AM

  Hydro is a double edged sword. Washington produces 70% of its energy from clean hydro, and supplies almost a quarter of the nation’s hydro power. Nothing is free.

• by locusofself on 12/26/20, 4:16 AM

  Pretty sure this is the first time I've seen my hometown newspaper on HN. Neat. My brother works in Bellingham WA doing Salmon related research stuff.

• by ficklepickle on 12/25/20, 11:43 PM

  It's nice and all, but it is unlikely to lead to a returning salmon population.

  Even if the spawn make it through the dams, they won't be able to come back when they reach spawning age.

  They need to invest tons of money in salmon ladders and naturalization, for example, like we are doing in BC. That would be quite the project for the Grand Coulee dam, as I remember it being quite large.

  Hopefully this is the first step in the massive commitment that will be needed to restore the salmon population there. The salmon run is such an important part of the ecosystem.

• by jjhawk on 12/26/20, 3:09 AM

  Salmon by Mark Kurlansky is a fantastic read on the historical + ecological history of of this.

• by macinjosh on 12/26/20, 4:34 AM

  I don't really care. Environmentalists will never happy until the world's population is so low that they feel like 'nature' is unaffected by humans. In reality that means they want the world to themselves and anyone with any other interests to be plant fertilizer. There haven't been a specific kind of fish there for _eighty_ years and it hasn't impacted human life so why do we need to spend tax dollars to have them there now? It is complete lunacy based on a fetish for a 'natural' state that isn't real. News flash, humans are natural and I don't loathe them like some environmentalists do. People are starving and dying of viruses (both 'natural' states I'll add) but we need to spend our time and money building a fucking ladder for a fish? I speak truth even though I will be downvoted into oblivion. Worth it.