Word: dams
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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...
...million citizens engaged in 58,000 public protests, up 15% compared with the previous year. Figures for last year are not available, but there's been no apparent letup in unrest. In November, for example, as many as 100,000 Sichuan province residents physically blocked construction of a hydroelectric dam before police could regain control...
...Week of Water PAKISTAN President Pervez Musharraf promised compensation for victims of the floods that killed at least 278 people nationwide, including 135 known to have died when a dam burst in the southern coastal province of Balochistan. The rain and snowstorms that battered the country last week left tens of thousands of people homeless...