There is a third way between tearing out our dams and doing nothing — and it is the one almost no one is building.
Hydropower is the cleanest firm, dispatchable power we have. Its one real cost to salmon is passage — and passage is an engineering problem with modern solutions. So we do not have to choose between clean energy and wild fish. We can keep the power on, move the fish through, and build the next generation of dams to be something genuinely new: transparent to a salmon run.
We are not for dams or against them. We are for the evidence, dam by dam.
Some dams should come out — small, old, uneconomic structures with no fish passage that block prime habitat and cannot be made passable for a reasonable cost. Others are worth keeping — large, firm-power dams that can be retrofitted so fish survive. Tearing out a clean-energy dam that could be made passable is as much a mistake as clinging to a derelict one that never should have been built. The honest line runs on the data, not on a slogan.
Federal clean-energy dollars today flow not to new mega-dams but to adding power to the tens of thousands of existing dams that generate none, to pumped storage, and to modernizing what we already have. That is the right instinct: capture clean, firm power from infrastructure that already exists, at a fraction of the environmental cost.
Any genuinely new dam should have to clear an honest test — its full benefits, minus its full costs including the cost to fish and habitat, must come out ahead. Most will not. The rare ones that do should be built to the standard below.
If a dam is going to be built or rebuilt, here is the standard we call for — the proven pieces, engineered together into one facility designed from the ground up to be transparent to a salmon run. Every component below already works. No one has yet combined them all into a single dam. That is the opportunity.
Modern turbines pass juvenile salmon at 98–100% survival at roughly 94% efficiency — verified in independent testing. The deadliest point of a dam becomes survivable, with no loss of power.
Selective, multi-level withdrawal blends water from different reservoir depths to hold a safe downstream temperature — solving the warm-reservoir problem that fish ladders alone cannot touch.
Modern nature-like fishways already move adult salmon upstream at about 99%. Surface bypass and gentle volitional transport carry the young fish safely down — the half of the problem old ladders ignore.
Designs that pass sediment instead of trapping it keep spawning gravel moving and the river connected — sited for low-head, run-of-river impact wherever the terrain allows.
We hold this to an honest standard. Hydropower is low-carbon, but it is not zero-impact, and no dam is free. The salmon-transparent dam is a synthesis of proven parts — each demonstrated on its own, not yet assembled into a single built facility. We are describing what the engineering already makes possible, and calling for someone to build it.
We are also clear-eyed that large infrastructure runs over budget and behind schedule. The cost-benefit bar is real, not a formality — which is exactly why most new dams should not be built, and the few that are should be built right.
This is our active-recovery thesis in concrete and steel. Where the reflex is to demolish and wait, ours is to engineer the problem down and keep the clean power on. It is the same answer the Delta, the Columbia & Snake, and our own Puget Sound are still waiting for — intervene and build, rather than manage the decline.
A capable society does not choose between its rivers and its power. It engineers its way to both. Read about how we work, or get involved.
The engineering figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
Questions about our facts and figures? Contact us.