Hydropower Versus Fish

By: Jessica Robertson

With the challenge of answering the biggest environmental problems of our age comes the responsibility to simultaneously bring balance to all aspects of the planet. Unfortunately, harmony does not always exist between the various strategies for environmental improvement, but it is our responsibility to establish and preserve healthy relationships between all aspects of the environment.

One not-so-harmonious relationship is represented in the current battle between the fish population and the high-pressure dams powering the hydropower industry. Hydropower is an essential component of the new environment-focused energy industry. Renewable, clean energy is produced and stored by capturing the potential of flowing water, often with dams and turbines in rivers. However, these mechanisms are detrimental to fish in their locale.

Fast, coursing water churns powerfully around the dam area, creating a pressure change that is so dramatic that it can cause serious internal injury or death to fish. The forces can burst a fish’s swim bladder, an organ responsible for maintaining buoyancy at a particular depth; it is designed to inflate and deflate as needed, but the pressure changes in this phenomenon, known as barotrauma, simply cause too much change too fast for the swim bladder to withstand. Besides these serious internal injuries, fish can also become disoriented in the raging waters around the machinery, and they are at risk of being thrashed about by blades of the turbine.

Even with the great success and promise of hydropower, the industry is aware of the dangers to local fish populations. Hydropower is too crucial to the development of a sustainable planet to be forgotten, but, at the same time, it is intolerable that our ecosystem suffer at the hands of “clean” energy. Is hydropower truly “clean” or “sustainable” if whole populations of water-dwelling animals are lost?

The dilemma is being quickly addressed across the globe in laboratories and in real-life application. Strategies are being implemented for preventing the dangerous pressure change around the dam, making rivers again safe for their inhabitants, and making clean energy truly clean.