After 13 years of construction and the displacement more than a million people, China pours the final concrete on enormous Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River:
Image courtesy of DigitalGlobe
The Three Gorges Project, with 25,000 workers and a budget of $24 billion, is China's most ambitious engineering undertaking since the Great Wall. It has replaced Brazil's Itaipu Dam as the world's largest hydroelectric and flood-control installation, Chinese officials said, with the strength to hold back more water than Lake Superior and power 26 generators to churn out 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year when the final touches are completed in 2008. Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border, by comparison, generates more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year."This is the grandest project the Chinese people have undertaken in thousands of years," said Li Yong'an, general manager of the government's Three Gorges corporation, which runs the project under the direct leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao.
According to Reuters, the completion was marked with a subdued ceremony:
A brass band played and confetti rained over the site after workers poured the last batch of concrete.
The BBC reports critics say the human cost has been far too high. More than a million people have been moved to make way for the dam and at least 1,200 towns and villages will be submerged under the rising waters of the dam's reservoir.
Environmentalists warn that the reservoir behind the dam is already severely polluted and likely to get worse as waste from big cities upstream like Chongqing flow into the Yangtze.
It is interesting that China was able to undertake such a massive project. It is unimaginable that a project of this scope would even be contemplated in the U.S. anymore.
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