Three Gorges Dam Begins Storing Water

Anonymous Coward writes "The Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world, and one of the largest engineering projects underway right now, has begun accumulating water in the reservoir."

Comments

Disaster looming?

[mosch]

Let's just hope this one works out better than the Gouhou dam did. It's my understanding that there are longstanding questions about the build quality, and that there have already been problems with cracks appearing in the dam.

Re:WHo wants to start the pool?

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy]

I give it less.

From:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto ry&cid=57 0&e=6&u=/nm/china_dam_dc

The project also has been plagued over the past decade by corruption and discovery of hundreds of cracks in the dam, though the Guangzhou Daily on Sunday quoted officials as saying the cracks, some tens of yards long, were not a danger.

link to Dam story

[handy_vandal]

Correct link here

Re:No offense to the chineese but

[abbamouse]

The Three Gorges Dam is a disaster. Frankly, even the Hoover Dam isn't all roses. Large dam projects flood huge areas of land, eliminating entire ecosystems, displacing large numbers of people, destroying archaeological evidence, and submerging economically productive land. There's something to hate for everyone, whether liberal or conservative. Check out the ecology of the Colorado River sometime. Interestingly, the things can even increase CO2 concentrations by flooding green areas. The effect can be quite substantial.

There are also practical difficulties, like the buildup of silt (which always seems to happen much faster than anyone anticipates) and the costs of construction and maintenance (they aren't as cheap as one might expect).

Are they better than fossil fuel plants? Probably. Personally, I like them a lot more than nuclear plants (largely for economic reasons). But I just can't find it in me to be happy about their construction.

A quick and dirty summary of the downside of dams can be found here, though a quick Google search will reveal many more pages for and against.

as big as lake superior

[goombah99]

the washington post has a better article.

The dam will ultimately be able to crank out 18,200 megawatts of energy a year, the equivalent of 26 nuclear power plants or 10 big coal-fired power stations burning 50 million tons of coal.

or about 36 watts per person! China better invest in transmeta or low power dragon cpus if they ever want to make computers ubiquitous. However because of falling energy prices in china, its unlikely the overrun cost of this damn will be recouped quickly, making future investments in energy production in doubt.

With as much water as Lake Superior, the reservoir will stretch 385 miles east to west and more than one mile north to south and 600 feet deep. unlike lake superior all of this water is held back from a lower flood plain by a single entity--the dam. THis could be a spectacular flood if it breeched.

but there's reason to worry. small cracks are appearing in the damn and construction officials arrested for corruption. 60 percent of the waste entering the reservoir comes from sources that can't be treated, such as fields laden with fertilizer and insecticide. Of the 90 tributaries entering the reservoir, 60 are now considered heavily polluted. It may well become a cesspool the size of lake superior.

One might also worry how this will shift the eco system and farmland down stream. THe river has traditionally created havoc with its floods but presumably also renewed farmlands and sustained eco systems down stream.

Dam collapses killed 220,000 in China in the 70s

[TheNarrator]

It's a little known fact that in the 1970s a dam project in Henan Province of China was responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people. This was in fact the biggest technological diaster of all time. Here's some more information about this and other dam collapses.

Re:A Nice Target

[Moridineas]

Anyone want to wipe out the lower half of China has now been given a perfect missle target. Although much ignored by Western media, note that China also faces Uygurs terrorist (otherwised called "freedom fighters" by Western media) threats connected with al Quaeda in the XinJiang Province.

Fact: Some Uyghurs have been implicated in bomb attacks (I don't believe any attacks took place outside of Xinjiang).

Fact: The Communist Chinese government has forcibly moved millions of Han Chinese into Xinjiang over the past 50 years in an attempt to pacify the Uyghur population.

Fact: The Uyghurs are neither Han nor Chinese--they are ethnically Turkish, look different from the Chinese, and speak a language that is mutually intelligible (with difficulty) with the language of Turkey. Before they were conquered by China over 50 years ago they were an independent nation. It is true that this area had been under MARGINAL Chinese control off and on for centuries (there were 42 results under Manchu rule for instance). As a side note, this area has oil. Coincidence that China cares about it?

Fact: The Chinese have not had the best track record dealing with minorities or hunman rights in general (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, East Turkestan, etc etc).

Fact: AFAIK (and AFAAK) the rumored links to al-Qaeda are just that--rumors. Until proven otherwise, they are as insubstantial as links of Saddam to al-Qaeda.

So in conclusion, this is simply another minority group (again, see Inner Mongolia and Tibet for the other two most publicized examples) that is being horribly treated in China--and no one cares because of business opportunities...

i am chinese and i am pretty impressed

[lingqi]

erm...
1/3 of power requirements in china is, ahem, what, insignificant in your book? what do you propose they do? buy hamster mills? connect all the population into a computer simulation and harvest bioelectricity? (actually, in hind sight - the harvesting bioelectricity thing might make a good movie)

you'd be surprised how much infrastructure stuff is going on in china right now. highways are beginning to connect most metropolitan areas to one another, new airports are springing into existance (ever compare the new shanghai airport (pudong) with the old (hongqiao)?

Since the dam holds so much potential in the roadblock to china's industrial and economical future (seriously - power-outages are worse there than CA) - I wouldn't call it an "show of pride." That kind of stuff would be probably be exemplified by the maglev rail in shanghai.

Now, being somewhat earthquake-prone is (i think) one of the reasons why they built a gravity dam; it's blocking water just by its weight. I am concerned about the quality of the build - but that is different from concern about the intention to build it. There are no plausible alternatives currently, you see. Besides, if Japan's nuclear powerplant can survive through the recent (last week) 7.0 earthquake, I'd think the technology is there to keep a dam steady.

Re:i am chinese and i am pretty impressed

[Kaiwen]

1/3 of power requirements in china is, ahem, what, insignificant in your book?

Because no one can predict with any certainty what China's energy needs will be ten to twenty years out, any predictions of this sort are guesswork at best -- pure marketing at worst. The fact is, over the last decade power availability throughout the area to be served by the Three Gorges dam has consistently outstripped demand, meaning there is currently a power glut. This may well change in the future, but no one can say for sure.

I had a final chance to visit the Three Gorges last August, with a tour guide who was an unabashed mouthpiece for government propaganda. Coincidentally, there was a Canadian hydro-electric engineer in our group who had worked on dam projects around the world. He asked some very pointed questions, making the tour guide very uncomfortable.

One of the biggest potential problems with the dam project is silting. All dams eventually silt up -- all the detritus normally washed down river kept afloat by the currents settles out as the currents slow, eventually building up behind dams and other obstructions, rendering all dams eventually unusable.

The Three Gorges dam is different only in the unprecendented scale of the problem. The fact that the Yangtze is both one of the largest and one of the most silt-heavy rivers in the world makes conventional de- and anti-silting methodologies utterly inadequate and makes the the success of the project heavily dependent on experimental and largely untested (Gezhouba Dam notwithstanding) methods. Should these methods fail to perform as projected, the dam -- more than twenty years in the making -- could silt in in as little as ten years, making it one of the most costly debacles in human history.

Amazingly, the project has not even attempted to address the other silting problem. As the mighty Yangtze rushes into the upper end of the reservoir near Baidicheng -- 360 miles southwest of the Dam -- the sudden slowing will deposit by some estimates thousands of tons of silt per day, eventually resulting in massive flooding problems along the entire riverway from Chongqing to Yunyang.

There are no plausible alternatives currently, you see.

This is simply not true. In the years since the Three Gorges project was begun any number of alternative technologies have appeared. Gas-fueled combined cycle plants and co-generators, for example, produce virtually no pollution or greenhouse gases, are smaller, safer, cheaper, more reliable, less sociologically or environmentally disruptive, and more adaptable -- meaning they can be constructed relatively quickly to meet demand and can be located near the need. This last point is not insignificant, as transmission leakage will consume a large percentage of the power generated by the dam. By some estimates, transmission losses from the dam to Beijing could run as high as 70%. As natural gas becomes more prevelant, combined cycle plants will become even more economically attractive.

Which leads to the next problem: the project is already facing severe financial difficulties. Nearly every original investor has fled, and the few that haven't already pulled out are in the process of doing so, leaving the government to foot nearly the entire bill. While Beijing has attempted to put a bright face on this, the fact remains that few investors expect the dam will ever turn a profit, both because of the immense (and growing) construction costs -- not helped by the massive corruption which has dogged the project -- and because newer, cheaper alternatives threaten to undercut the dam's market before construction is even completed. The fact is, hydro-electric dams are outdated both technologically and economically.

Most of the sociological impact of the dam will takes years to manifest. To date, the government has relocated less than half the two million people who are being displaced. Our tour guide gushed with pride as he showed us the shin

Re:As Stupid as Aswan

[The Master Control P]

In short, the problem isn't food production, it's food distribution. There is PLENTY food to feed every single person in the world right now. It's just that most of them don't have enough money to buy it, and that the countries with a major surplus (The US exports > half it's corn) aren't willing to forgo enough profits to at least prevent people from starving to death.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the Proletariat sieze the means of production. Just that enough food be given away, in addition to paid exports, to make sure that people at least get a basic diet.

In addition to this, the most crucial thing is EDUCATION. Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime. Teach people modern farming methods, give them the necessary equipment, and you'll suddenly see that no one is starving anymore.

Re:And so we mourn

[cioxx]

it's not the historical sites, as much as it hurts the ecology as a whole. People don't realize that diverting massive streams of water to create artificial dums in places not intended by nature could have catastrophic results.

I direct you to study the history of Aral sea, which was the biggest man-made clusterfuck in USSR history aside from the obvious.

more than thirteen thousand hectares of fertile soils were flooded by the Toktogul Reservoir. In addition to constricting the downstream water supply to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and eventually to the Aral, the dam destroyed the fragile ecological balance within the region and the once beautiful area surrounding the reservoir was transformed into a desert

...
There is much more

And to put this into perspective, it was such a small sea but had so much impact on surrounding areas as a result of artificially invoked desiccation.

Re:Hoover dam will stand 1800 years!

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Look at the difference between old time skyscrapers (Empire State) and new ones (not a completley fair comparison, but the World Trade Center). The Empire State building has taken at least 2 plane hits during its lifespan.

Once during WWII with a twin engine bomber.

That's an unfair comparison (and a little more than "not a completley fair"). The WWII bomber is smaller than a 757, would have been moving at a slower speed, and wouldn't have been carrying as much fuel. Don't forget, it was the fire that caused it to collapse.

Re:lamenating progress

[asparagus]

With 30-35 million people, Chongqing is the largest municipality in the world. Most people have never heard of it.

-Brett

Re:There is a hell of a lot of criticism of China.

[saitoh]

I did my term paper in my History of Modern China class this past semester and presented the findings at our university's (UMPI) annual conference during a session. As such, I'll respond and try and clear up a few things from what I found:

Coal power isn't an option if your looking at the environment. Chungqing which will now be a seaport has smog that makes LA look pristine... Its the industrial center of that section of China and holds 31 million people (to put it in perspective New York City only has 8 million during the 2000 census as per the New York City Department of Planning has on their website). So much so that there are reports that people who have asthma and journey there are expected to (and have) died within 4-6 weeks.

I honestly don't know about the nuclear power. That was outside the scope of my search so I can only estimate that yeah, there would be a buttload of nuclear waste.

I will say this though, with a body of water that is this large (long, not wide) that the salinity of the water will increase (as is found in other large bodies of water and other dam projects), as such, with this stretching long periods, the watershed is also expected to become saltier and the plant-matter close to the water is also expected to suffer.

These are only the negatives, downstream where there are large amounts of citrus fruit and the "bread basket" of China is located (presumed to be the second largest until the Taiping Rebellion) will now have stabilized flow of the Yangtze River instead of the traditional seasonal changes of approximately 30 meters in depth.

China isn't *controlled* by the communist party, its controlled by the rivers. Rivers in China change course often, and when they do, approximately 1.2 million people die each year due to either flooding or starvation with a poor crop (figure obtained from in class lecture, will find an online source if asked). China lives "on the edge" of starvation constantly with only 12% of their land being arable, so when a river moves, its BIG NEWS. This will be the first time that many farmers downstream are able to install permanent irigation.

- Page

Re:lamenating progress

[DoraLives]

largest municipality

Be glad you don't live there. From the link: The city currently lacks a wastewater collection and disposal system; virtually all domestic and industrial wastewater discharges through some 600 random discharge points into the two rivers, which run through the city. Since these two rivers are the source of the city's drinking water, the lack of wastewater management facilities gives rise to a daily risk to public health.

Phew. No thanks.

wind power doesn't kill many birds

[js7a]

the blades are extremely fast and kills a lot of birds in the area

On the contrary, that idea is generally a myth.