Word: damming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vice Minister for Industry and Handicrafts sits in his office in Vientiane and allows himself to dream. From his desk, Nam Viyaketh points to a map of the country pinned on the far wall. It's dotted with dozens of red spots, each a potential site for a hydroelectric dam. Within 30 years, says Nam, Laos could have a generation capaciy of 12,000 MW of electricity (it currently has a production capacity of 700 MW) and exporting it to energy-hungry neighbors like Thailand and China, generating billions of dollars in revenue. "We can be like Kuwait," he says...
...country anymore," Nam says. "We want to change." This week, the World Bank will take a step to turn that dream into a concrete reality. The Bank's executive board of directors will meet in Washington, D.C. on Thursday and is expected to endorse a controversial $1.25 billion hydroelectric dam that even developers admit will have major social and environmental impact. Yet the dam could earn the country $2 billion in revenue over a period of 25 years?money the government has promised it will use to pull its people out of poverty. That makes it a gamble the World...
...both the World Bank and the Laos government believe that the Nam Theun 2 dam can help fix it. The project is the cornerstone of the government's giddy goal of becoming the "battery of Southeast Asia," and has been on the drawing board for almost 20 years. The dam will flood an area the size of Singapore, bleed one river almost dry and swell another, force the relocation of 6,200 people, and affect as many as another 100,000 living in and around the country's central Nakai Plateau. A joint project between the Laos government...
...Such big dreams will inevitably come at a cost. Hydropower, once touted as cheap, clean energy, has fallen out of favor in recent years. In 2000, a report by the World Commission on Dams found that in developing countries the damage to communities and environment from building dams was rarely offset by the economic and developmental gains, which often failed to meet expectations. Assuming the World Bank approves funding for the project, Nam Theun 2 will be the first major new dam project the bank has supported in a decade. Opposition to the project has been fierce from international environmental...
...their faith, says Porter, is a slew of economic reports and social and environmental impact studies they demanded of developers?all of which have been made available for public scrutiny. The Bank believes there are enough safeguards and mitigation measures now in place to minimize the impact of the dam and insists it has extracted guarantees from the Laos government that revenue will be used to reduce poverty...