Word: dammed
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...both visions of the Three Gorges -- the ideal and the real -- are about to be consigned to a watery grave. Later this month, Chinese Premier Li Peng will preside over the symbolic first pouring of concrete in what is intended to be the world's largest hydroelectric dam. Already, mammoth earthworks on both banks of the construction site have begun to constrict the flow of the river where it gushes forth from the Xiling Gorge. Over the next 14 years, if all goes as planned, first an earthen coffer dam and then a 200-yd.-high concrete spillway and adjacent...
...gigantic Three Gorges project has inspired awe and opposition ever since it was first proposed 75 years ago by modern China's founding father, Sun Yat- sen. During the 1980s the dam plan became a favorite target of pro- democracy dissidents. It was not until 1992, three years after the critics were brutally silenced in Tiananmen Square, that the communist rulers rammed the project through the National People's Congress. Even today, as construction finally gets rolling, the dam still draws fire from environmentalists around the world. To opponents, it is a symbol of mankind's monstrous interventions in nature...
Powerless to block Three Gorges, critics hope it will be at least slowed by inadequate financing. They are urging governments and private investors to withhold the $3 billion in foreign loans and investments that the Chinese are seeking to help build the $30 billion dam. Says Dai Qing, a Chinese opponent of the dam who won a Goldman Environmental Prize last year, and is now a visiting scholar at the Australian National University: "I hope that people all over the world who love the environment and who love China will band together to stop this disastrous project...
Many opponents of Three Gorges have no quarrel with the effort to move away from coal toward hydropower. But they argue that for a lower price, numerous smaller dams could produce more power and greater flood-control benefits. They fear that a dam so large on the notoriously muddy Yangtze will lead to dangerous buildups of silt in some parts of the river, creating new obstacles to navigation and causing floods upstream. Chinese officials respond that both big and small dams are needed. Indeed, 10 projects smaller than Three Gorges, with a total capacity of nearly 12,000 megawatts...
Whether or not Three Gorges is ever finished, hydropower can never meet the bulk of China's energy needs. Part of the problem is that most of the potential dam sites are in the less populated southwestern part of the country, making it expensive to transmit electricity to the industrial north and east. Experts say hydropower will account for no more than 20% of China's electricity generation...