Yes, failure could or would be devastating to life and limb and costly just like have a natural disaster like a volcanic explosion, a hurricane, or an earthquake, etc. Sound familiar? Dams are MAN made and have a usable lifespan after which is the repeated ongoing cycle of repair or replacement which is guaranteed. Some areas do need reasonable flood controls while most of the other dams are to create man made lakes or reservoirs of water for recreation or humans uses or irrigation and some are producing lots of usable hydro power (they are the minority).
These dammed reservoirs come with lots of extreme costs and dangers also and so many were never needed to begin with and now will require extreme expense to repair the un-needed. Why should good money vastly inflated and be thrown wildly after bad money should be the norm? Aren't we smarter than that? Remove them once and the long term problem is solved forever.
Only mother nature is self sustaining and really doesn't need repairing ever! We, the humans have created the need for man made structures and allowed the building of cities, homes, businesses, etc next to these dammed up rivers and un-natural backwaters and now we have what we have and the issues that come with having done such. Hello, is anyone home?
In most of the USA, very little hydro power is generated today due to many reasons and you must have adequate water going into the reservoir first or there will be little or no power produced. Most hydo power production is virtually seasonal dependent anyway. Just like solar is sun dependent and wind turbines are wind dependent. Very expensive to build and maintain and a very short service life before needing very expensive major repairs, revisions, or replacement. There's no FREE lunch!
We've kind of gone crazy in our expectations and even lots of fraud of finding that FREE lunch and it's wasted so many hundreds of billions of dollars already with nearly fruitless gains. More money wasted than all the costs that would have been incurred with perfecting our usage and acquisition of and from our vast known natural resources and newlt discoverd resources and ways to extract usable energy from them. As an engineer, YES, we should "explore" new energy ways but be sure they have proven long term viability on a small scale before throwing out the baby with the bathwater like we have. We the people are the losers!
