A River Runs Through It

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Hydroelectric dams kill fish, destabilize ecosystems, and make it hard for river-dependent Native American tribes to get three squares a day. Concerned activists, stymied by an unsympathetic Bush administration, are swimming upstream just to get more 'ladders' to help fish navigate the locks. But according to OnEarth (Spring 2005), a mechanical engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston has successfully tested a turbine so efficient in generating energy that it could one day eliminate the need for these environmental hazards.

OnEarth reports that professor Alexander Gorlov's helical turbine, a device that's 100 inches long and resembles 'an oversize beater from an old hand-held mixer,' can harness kinetic energy from any body of moving water, including canals, open oceans, and rivers. So-called free flow hydropower costs about $1,500 per kilowatt, roughly the same as wind power, and the whirling turbines can harness up to 3,000 gigawatts of power, which is 97 percent more efficient than any other current power source. Preliminary tests also indicate that, given space, fish will swim around the whirling turbines.

The Republic of South Korea installed a Gorlov turbine and plans to order thousands more from a manufacturer in New Jersey, but the U.S. government has not shown much enthusiasm for the invention, save for a research and development grant in 1990. That's a shame, since there are many places in the United States where an alternative way to generate hydroelectric power could be beneficial. One is the Pacific Northwest's Klamath-Trinity watershed, where, EcoNews (April 2005) reports, there has been a drastic decline in the number of endangered wild salmon due to dam-related diseases and low water flows.

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