The Three Gorges Dam, which will reach completion Saturday, is China’s Great Wall across the Yangtze River, a project that many expect to be a source of immense national pride for centuries.
Engineers say they and the workers — many of them migrants from Yunnan province near China’s border with Vietnam — will hold a modest ceremony Saturday as the last crane-load of concrete is poured on top of the dam.
It will mark 13 years of unprecedented labour, although it will still be more than two years before the project becomes fully operational, as some equipment, including the last power generators, remain to be installed.
The essential structure is finishing 9 months ahead of schedule.
My friends in ecological movements are aghast for they approve of no dam. Self-delusion isn’t limited to neo-cons and other amateurs in political economy. Some weep and wail over China’s dynamic economy and hold it responsible for growing pollution — though, China decreased their dependence on oil, last year, a couple of percentage points. And 50% of their air pollution comes from the same comfortable, affordable beast that beget “Auld Reekie” after WW2. They rely on coal stoves and open coal fires for heat and cooking in most homes. Probably, for another decade, at least. It will pass.
The dam will have three main benefits, including flood prevention, power generation and improved navigation on the Yangtze.
“Currently we have serious floods every 10 years,” said Wang Xiaomao, deputy chief engineer at the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee. “With the dam, that will change to once every 100 years.”
On the left bank, 14 sets of 700 megawatt turbine and generator units are already in operation. On the right bank, 12 further 700 megawatt units are still under construction and installation. With a capacity already equivalent to Itaipu, situated on the border of Brazil and Paraguay and currently the largest operating hydro-electric dam in the world, the Three Gorges will eventually overshadow all others.
A new tender process will be held by the end of the year for adding a new power station with a set of six more 700 megawatt generators, underground and next to that of the right bank.
One final benefit of the project is that it will elevate the Yangtze for hundreds of kilometers inland, allowing ocean-going vessels to travel as far as the enormous, but little known metropolis of Chongqing.
This will, planners hope, help open up China’s underdeveloped west, which has in many ways missed out on economic reforms largely because of its isolation from overseas markets.
This post also marks the first issue of Simon Mansfield’s online Sino Daily. Regulars will know I often link to his Terra Daily and Space Daily for items of science. He’s been leading up to this new periodical for longer than he would care to remember, I’m certain.
I’m pleased to be a charter subscriber.
First I’d like to make a correction: There is not such thing as the Yangtze River. It was the name that the British gave to the river. The true name is Chiang Jiang. There is not — — River, because the chinese name translates directed to Long River.
Also, although the project brings flood control, clean hydro-electric power, and water management capabilities, what is failed to mention is the flooding of thousand year old historical monuments in the resevoir. Also hundred thousands of people were evacuated from there homes that they have lived in for tens of generations. Many cemetaries are flooded, were the Chinese go to honor their ancestors in a sign of respect, but those many people can’t do that anymore. I took the last cruise ship to visit the Three Gorges, before the dam was sealed for flooding the resevoir, and the landscape is breath-taking. Nothing is truly comparable to the wonderful views. Of course, none of this can be enjoyed anymore. I also visited the dam, not entirely built yet, but was a spectacular view. So the success of this project is a advancement into better at the same time, a loss of history from 500BCE (?).
Also the silt problem is quite at large. It is the main cause of seasonal flooding. The dam also serves the purpose of filtering out the silt from upstream, while the government plants trees and undergrowth along the river banks to prevent run-off.
Again with the ecology bashing. Dams are good for power, yes. Dams are bad because:
– The silt that the river washes down to the delta stops; fertile farmland gone forever.
– The silt removal shrinks the land at the mouth of the river, causing the ocean to reclaim the delta. Think! New Orleans! Levees and river straigtening blocked the silt from hitting the wetlands, so the wetlands are disappearing. That means when a storm hits, the water rises and there is no land to absorb the overflow. Flood. Big floods. Hell, Mark Twain comented on the problem with engineering rivers in his book “Life on the Mississippi” in the 1870’s. Rivermen knew more than the Corps did.
– The silt that no longer washes to the delta now collects behind the dam. Not mentioned in most dam success stories is the constant dredging needed to keep them unblocked.
Today’s word: False middle
“perhaps start referring to your friends in the ecological movement who are self delusional as neo-luddites. it’s a nice epithet, right up there with neo-con.”
(Neo-con isn’t an epithet. It’s what they called themselves. It’s becoming an epithet.)
Also, you are proclaiming the fallacy of the assumed equivalency, or the fallacy of the false middle. Because there is a pyschotically overboard right-wing movement doesn’t mean that those who oppose are automatically the equivalent, only with flipped polarity.
The neo-cons and the business cons are insanely selfish, manipulative, mendacious, and wrong. This does not set up a balance to the equation consisting of medacious, self-delusional scientists who hate people and technology.
In this case, science is right, the dams are bad. The scientists are not a delusional left-wing nutgroup which must exist because the right-wingers exists, which leads to the (false) conclusion that the truth lies in the judicious middle ground. They are right because they can prove they are right: the river will block the silt, causing the delta to shrink, wetlands to disappear, and the ocean to reclaim the delta. Floods, baby, big ones, a la New Orleans. Also changes in salinity in the land as the sea reclaims it own, shoreline erosion, desertification, on and on. On the other hand, the dam will maybe provide power for electric bikes and cars instead of the Chinese recreating the American gasoline disaster, only with four times the population. A net win for CO2 and CO emmissions. There is a tradeoff. Delta for the warming mitigation.
Sometimes, the middle is wrong. As Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
It’s pretty darn impressive. Also, since it was designed to withstand earthquakes of up to magnitude 7, while only magnitude 6 to 6.5 quakes are expected in that area in the near future, things seem real fine.
http://www.threegorgesprobe.org/tgp/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=9158
1. Ranron suggested an interesting point — so, after Googling through several Chinese sources, it seems the Chinese uniformly use Yangtze as the English word for the river. Must have been a hell of a trip, though.
2. Oh Paul, Paul. If the neo-cons aren’t important to you, why must you instantly try to hijack us OT by leaping to their defense. Neo-con as a pejorative was a diminishing quantity before the accession of PNAC to ideological leadership of the Republican Party. They put it in print, dude. Starting with the PNAC website. They use the term to differentiate themselves — correctly, though they think it’s positively — from traditional American Conservatives. That’s also why the PNAC types use the term RINO for Republicans In Name Only as a term of derision for “other” American Conservatives.
3. Silt is getting as boring as the Colorado bumpersticker, “Silt Happens”. It is, after all, a nice little town on the Colorado Plateau. Dredging is not constant at any of the major damsites constantly referred to by enviros whose science, sadly, often is as out-of-date as works penned in the 19th Century about the Mississippi River. The gospel of dire predictions have almost never been matched by reality. Rivers, silt and deltas do not comprise a simplistic sum for either the Yangtze OR the Mississippi. Among other factors, the former hasn’t suffered from a century or so of fools trying to make it run in a straight line — or manipulating its terminal course to satisfy the commercial needs of a single riverbound city.
Is there a trade-off (or trade-offs)? You betcha. Is the sum a positive? Looks like it from here. I’d say the most amazing thing about the whole project is that there was government leadership willing to sit down 20 years ago to examine the question — make reasonable decisions — and get it into motion over 13 years ago. An attitude I don’t find foreign to Asian philosophy at all — and which would astound me living here in a culture scared siltless over making a decision which might affect shares pricing beyond 2 quarters.
I agree with moss’ last statement. The question for China was about the trade-offs. Of course there is a major ecolgical impact when the flow rate of a major river is changed so drastically (though scientists can only theorize what that will be.) There was also a human impact, with all of the relocated villages and towns. On the other side, the economic and energy boost it huge. As with much in the world today, what is right and wrong is a matter of opinion.
No picture of an asian chick (because white ppl can’t tell the difference between chinese, korean or japanese) wearing a bikini and with her legs spread?
Don’t generalize Angel…..I’m a white people and I can tell them all apart.
While I admire their follow throughness Moss, I find that it’s always easier to push projects like this foreward when your a dictatorship, than when your a democracy.
China isn’t afraid to drill for oil when they find it, they aren’t afraid to move 1 million people for a Dam. Neither of these things can get done in this country, and we all know why.
Chinese to the Corporate America in 2010 will be like the Japanese to the Corporate America in the 1980s.
Sad.
You add a good point there Joshua. I was also thinking about all those now flooded historical artifacts When your country is covered in artifacts already, losing a few won’t make any difference. The benefits of the dam will help China develop much more rapidly then before.
I’m saying that because everytime I turn the tellie and see an asian character a good amount of the time they’re playing a different ethnic group; something that has slowly been changed away and now are koreans playing as koreans, chinese playing as chinese and japanese playing as japanese (except “memoirs of a geisha.”) Plus I have friends who keep asking me if I can tell the difference between ethnic groups.
I live in a Latin American country where everyone insults everyone and things are simply brushed off, not in like some “developed” nations where everybody pretends to respect everyone. So ppl, lighten up.
You’re right about these environmentalists opposing everything. Going back nto an earlier post about drilling for natural gas off the coast, Rep. Abercrombia said his party is controlled by the environmentalist Taliban.
#13 Mr. Fusion….I was like 10 y/o when they started this Dam, but I remember my Mom showing me her video’s of the 3 gorges area, what a fantastic place. I was really upset that all of that would be gone when this dam was complete. But as I got older, I realised that a nation of over a billion people needed to take care of those people, and that even though it was a lousy choice, it was one they had to make. Not that many years ago, a flood of the Yangtze would routinely kill 30,000 or more people, I think as many as 120,000 around 40 years ago.
Chinese to the Corporate America in 2010 will be like the Japanese to the Corporate America in the 1980s.
And like the Japanese case, the American economy will eventually lurch well beyond the Chinese economy… allowing it to continue its dominance.