Mankind's Supremacy Over Nature
China represents a culture whose traditional aesthetic was one of refined delicacy. Traditional poetry, painting, embroidery, stone carving, delicate porcelains and colourful lacquer ware, jade ornaments and jewellery and stone-carved statuary, along with pithy sayings and a tradition of story-telling all representative of fine artistic sensibilities and artisanal capabilities.
The country also built one of the most singular structures other than a geological feature, capable of being seen in outer space, the Great Wall of China. From the delicate refined to the brutalist practical in challenging the primacy of nature, the country turned to taming the third-longest river in the world, the great Yangtze. The world's most gargantuan interference with nature's sublime designs, a particular hubris resulting in the Three Gorges Dam.
Built, most unfortunately, over six active fault lines in the Earth's crust. Representing a stupendous engineering feat, one that multinational engineering companies from Germany and the Scandinavian countries were eager to become involved with, and so was Canada, with its eager bank of consulting engineers. Canada, through CIDA and the Export Development Bank lent a hand by funding a feasibility study.
The official price tag of the enterprise is said to have been $25-billion, but there are rumours that this immense hydroelectric power project ended up costing up to three times that amount. The clever idea that the Yangtze could be harnessed for its hydroelectric potential, and the resulting dam would assist in opening up the interior of the country with greater shipping access to result in economic opportunities never did quite materialize.
But the Chinese government was so besotted with the idea that in building the dam it would enlarge its economic future, it set about expropriating ancestral land from millions of peasants and indigent subsistence farmers, creating a huge demographic of homeless, landless people with the promised compensation never quite materializing. Towns and villages, arable land and ancient archaelogical sites were all inundated in China's surge toward its future.
Mao Zedong never lived to see the Three Gorges dam finished and in service. It was his pet project. The ill people do live long after they have departed. In 2003 Chinese officials claimed that the dam could withstand the worst flood in 10,000 years, were it to occur. And then estimates began to reduce, to 1,000 years until in 2008 it was dropped to a mere 100-year flood.
This year of 2010, the flooding being experienced is severe and engineering experts are concerned.
Cracks in the dam first seen in 1999 are many and growing, some extending from top to bottom of the immense concrete infrastructure. Some hands-width wide, some two metres deep into the dam.
New towns meant to replace the original settlements were constructed on slopes of mountains and geologically unstable areas. Mudslides have already been experienced. Catastrophic landslides could occur causing the riverbank to collapse. Add to that potentially lethal combination that the 24-billion tonnes of untreated human and industrial waste dumped into the Yangtze annually.
China is infamous for the contamination of its rivers with industrial, radioactive and bio-hazardous materials casually let into the waterways wherever industrial plants exist...let alone just plain municipal garbage. It was initially planned that greater seafaring opportunities to accommodate deep-hulled ocean-going vessels would increase trade opportunities, leading to economic development in the landlocked interior. Instead, continual silting has committed the country to expensive and ongoing dredging operations.
Millions of people were displaced by the dam, never compensated, left to fend for themselves, stripped of their worldly possessions. They were given the thrill of their lifetimes, watching as the waters inundated their fields and towns, washing away their homes and whatever possessions they could not carry with them. Fears are that as the dam is overwhelmed by more floodwaters than it can contain, it will collapse.
Fears also that the incredible weight of the overwhelmed dam could precipitate an earthquake with devastating results. Not that China is a stranger to earthquakes. The cost to the people who once lived where the Three Gorges now exists is the world's largest dam, with its spectacular show when the ducts are open, and tourists flocking to see for themselves this modern world wonder of immense-scale engineering.
But the longevity of the dam is an unknown, as is the destabilizing effect of its location (over active fault lines in the Earth's crust), and purpose.
Its promised results have never quite been realized; it hasn't replaced by its output in hydro energy all the coal-fired plants that China planned to decommission. The tonnes of trash that float into the Yangtze river are difficult to contain and they present as a danger of jamming the dam's locks. The incessant need to collect the garbage presents yet another problem yet to be solved.
And while the Three Gorges dam was planned also for the purpose of halting deadly floods in the Yangtze valley, its flood control capacity is far less than anticipated. And Three Gorges power is turning out to be far more expensive than that achieved through high-efficiency gas turbines and co-generation. The clean, inexpensive energy that was originally contemplated with the building of this immense project simply does not appear to be possible.
And in recognition of the seeming failure of the plans that the Three Gorges dam would bring the country quickly into prosperity, government is no longer boasting.
Labels: China, Economy, Environment, Particularities/Peculiarities
posted by Pieface @ Monday, August 23, 2010
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