Recent case histories for dam decommissioning in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018 the Government of Alberta (GOA) released the Alberta Dam and Canal Safety Directive (ADCSD), including decommissioning, closure, and abandonment of dams and canals (Part 9) and a requirement that public infrastructure and its possible decommissioning should be evaluated when it either becomes a public safety issue or requires rehabilitation. Three recent dam removal projects are described in this paper, in terms of how they meet the requirements of the directive, with technical details provided on permitting; design; and construction in the context of each project. The first project (Klein Lake Dam) is a former water storage dam, constructed to expand a lake for recreational opportunities, which was removed instead of reconstructed after it experienced overtopping failure. The second project (Billy Goat Dam) is a mine water diversion dam for a mine pit that will be removed after cessation of mining, as part of long-term mine reclamation plans. The third project (Southeast Dyke) is a low consequence dyke for a cooling pond at a thermal generating station with consequences of failure that have decreased over time, due to mining activities modifying the downstream environment. These three projects are in different steps – from the process of design to completion of construction – with Klein Lake Dam removal being completed, Billy Goat Dam permitted but not decommissioned, and Southeast Dyke being in the process of obtaining permits to decommission. Additional perspectives from assessment of fish habitat, revegetation, soil nutrients and soil chemistry are also discussed as applicable to illustrate how environmental science informs dam removal design, supports obtaining regulatory permits for dam removal works, and guides construction planning for dam removal. The application of the ADCSD to dam removal and dam decommissioning projects is presented in this paper, with description of site-specific conditions that lead to selecting the dam removal or dam decommissioning option and discussion on how environmental studies inform design and permitting. The value of detailed environmental evaluations, hydrologic flood routing, assessing downstream impacts on third parties and environmental features, the importance of soil science and vegetation ecology to reservoir bottom revegetation, construction details where applicable, and relationships with regulators will be discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".