Friday Week Seven

...some questions...

1. What is the National Inventory of Dams? About how many dams are in the inventory? What dams are included/not included in the inventory?

2. What are the most common primary stated purposes of dams in the NID? Do most dams have one or multiple stated purposes?

3. What is the Bureau of Reclamation? What are "they" "reclaming"?Where (geographically) do they do most of their work? What is the other major federal agency that builds dams in the US? Why do we need two different federal agencies to build dams?

4. What is siltation? What causes siltation? Why is siltation such a barrier to the sustainability of dams at an individual and collective level? 

5. How do dams affect biodiversity?

6.  When did the rate of dam construction peak in the USA? Why is this important? When did our hydroelectric capacity increase? When did it stop increasing? What is the general metric for the design life of a dam? (according to the American Society of Civil Engineers)?

7. Is there such as thing as excess capacity to generate electricity?

Slides from today are on Sakai.