alt Hacker NewsOn a whole hydro has saved lives due to managing rivers which previously caused devastating floods.
The reason a ton of dams exists is not to make power, it is manage the river. Making power is a secondary concern.
But when we’re done with climate change we should of course restore as many rivers as possible due to the ecosystem damage they cause.
On the whole, nuclear power has saved many more lives, over 1.8 million up to 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
And the worst power-production disaster in history so far was neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl, but the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And it's not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure