Here's a link to the state's overview report on this, which summarizes and expands on a few other reports over the decades. This is not a new idea. It just keeps getting more expensive and more environmentally difficult as time goes on.
http://www.water.ca.gov/pubs/environment...tudy_report.pdfOne other point to consider is what's called "opportunity costs" of spending $10 billion and decades of effort on this. Other projects would be passed over for this. We would get a much higher environmental benefit for our buck putting this money and effort into more green power, mass transit, forest restoration, land trusts, research, etc. If all these potential projects were ranked systematically, removing O'Shaughnessy would not be anywhere near the top of the list based on a rational cost/benefit analysis. If there were serious ongoing environmental degradation such as Mono Lake or Owen's Valley, that would be different, but we're talking about losing green power here and a huge construction project to take it out. There are so many tradeoffs with removing this dam it's hard to define the net benefits and they come at a very very high cost, and we'd miss a lot of other opportunities.
