Over at The Big Picture, the Boston Globe‘s awesome photo blog, there’s a series of pictures showing the aftermath of a catastrophe (probably an explosion) at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in south-central Russia on August 17. It is the country’s largest power plant. As the Big Picture reports, the cause of the accident is still unknown, but there were at least 74 fatalities and a massive oil spill. (Earlier: a coal-ash disaster in Tennessee.) [%comments]
Power Is Not Free
TAGS: disasters, photography
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I admit to being a little confused about how a massive oil spill resulted from damage to a hydroelectric plant. Took me a moment to realize it was almost certainly downstream, but clearly some safety regulations were not well designed, placing some large oil-containing building in the floodplain below the damn.
Oh wow, nope, it actually had 40 tons of transformer oil. I hadn’t realized that particular consequence of a dam failure, before.
Hydroelectric does have a lot of costs and drawbacks, for a power source that is ostensibly free, which seems to have been the point here. I look forward to seeing whether solar has the same degree of challenges associated with it.