A water diversion channel opened formerly on October 6. During the next-phase construction through , ships will use the channel to bypass the dam site or use temporary locks now being built on the north bank of the Yangtze.
Engineers said that ships can safely pass through the channel except for peak water flow seasons. When the water flows faster than 25, cubic meters per second, it could be difficult for large ships to use the channel. The maximum flow for smaller ships is between 10, and 15, cubic meters per second.
Temporary ship locks are being built to ensure safe passage during the flood season which normally begins in May. The diversion channel will guarantee that passenger and cargo transport needs are met in the upper reaches of the Yangtze river during construction. Permanent ship locks will be in operation after the year The normal water level of meters will be achieved in the year , with the reservoir covering 1, sq.
The resettlement effort and the area to be inundated are unprecedented in Chinese history, with inundation affecting townships in 21 counties, cities or districts in Sichuan and Hubei provinces.
Some , people are scheduled for resettlement, with unforeseen factors most likely raising the figure to 1. The Three Gorges Reservoir will inundated 31, hectares of farmland, and will require the relocation of 1, industrial and mining enterprises, as well as power transmission and telecommunications facilities, harbors, small and medium-sized hydro-electric power plants, roads and pumping stations. The new reservoir, typical of facilities in gorges, will not have a so-called "big-belly" section similar to other facilities built on lakes.
Charm of Three Gorges to Remain The Three Gorges, one of the world's most famous scenic sites around Qutang, Wuxian and Xiling, features breathtaking scenery which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from at home and abroad each and every year. The charming scenery will be left untouched following the damming of the mid-section of the Xiling Gorge. The high-water mark once the dam is completed will stand at Miroslav Marence, an associate professor of storage and hydropower at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, said the problem is not the design of the dam, but the expectation that the dam can solve all the problems of flooding on the Yangtze, the third largest river by volume in the world.
For example, while the Three Gorges Dam can reduce the intensity of floods coming from upstream to a certain extent, it won't be able to prevent floods caused by intense rainfall on the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze or the tributaries in its basin entirely, he added. And that is part of the problem: A lot of the flooding in central and southern China this summer, for instance, was caused by rains that fell downstream and didn't ever go through the dam.
The dream of every Chinese leader. The Chinese have for millennia manipulated waterways for flood control, irrigation and navigation. For China's imperial rulers, the ability to harness rivers not only saved lives and brought prosperity, but also gave legitimacy to their reign, as natural disasters were taken as a sign that the emperor had lost the mandate of heaven, by which he ruled. This ambition to control water resources has only grown in modern times, with the prowess of technology.
Every Chinese leader since Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China, dreamed of building a massive dam on the Yangtze, which has repeatedly wreaked havoc on its banks during flood season.
In an industrial blueprint he laid out for the Republic of China in , Sun envisioned damming the Three Gorges to improve navigation and provide hydropower for the whole country. The revolutionary leader did not live to see this dream realized.
His successor Chiang Kai-shek carried on with the task in the s, inviting renowned American engineer John L. Savage -- best known for his work on the Hoover Dam -- to survey the valleys and draw up a design for the Three Gorges Dam.
Chiang even sent dozens of Chinese engineers to the US for training, but the project was abandoned during the Chinese Civil War. After the Chinese Communist Party took power, Chairman Mao Zedong endorsed the project, writing about "walls of stone" and "a smooth lake rising in the narrow gorges" in a poem. When his successor Deng Xiaoping brought up the idea again in the late s, it was strongly opposed by some leading hydrologists, intellectuals and environmentalists, who pointed to its human and environmental costs, from the mass relocation of residents to threats of geological hazards, environmental damage and loss of archeological sites.
It was heavily debated throughout the next decade, which was the most politically relaxed and liberal era in the history of Chinese Communist rule. But following the Tiananmen Square massacre in , open dissent was stifled and the political atmosphere turned oppressive.
Four months after the massacre, authorities banned " Yangtze! Confident that it could now push through the plan, the government put the dam to a vote before the country's legislature, the National People's Congress NPC , in The dam was approved, but about one-third of the delegates refused to endorse the plan -- an astonishingly low approval rate for China's usually compliant rubber-stamp parliament.
Some delegates said they were blindsided when the Three Gorges Dam suddenly appeared on the NPC's agenda, without advance notice or discussions about the project, according to a edition of "Yangtze! Yang Xinren, a delegate from Jilin province in northeastern China, was quoted by the book as saying : "The majority of the delegates are not fully informed of the technical aspects of the project.
So no matter how we vote, we vote in blindness. Why is the dam so controversial? One of the most controversial aspects of the mega-project was its enormous cost for villagers who had lived for centuries on the banks of the river.
To make way for the dam's massive reservoir, about 1. Building the Three Gorges Dam displaced more people than the three largest Chinese dams before it combined. The reservoir submerged two cities, towns and 1, villages along the river banks.
Residents of Fengjie, in southwest China's Chongqing, watch the demolition of buildings in their town on November 4, , to make room for the Three Gorges Dam's resevoir. Displaced residents have complained about inadequate compensation and a lack of farmland and jobs after relocation. Many have accused local governments of embezzling resettlement funds and using excessive force to quell protests.
In , the Chinese government acknowledged that some of the funds were embezzled or misused. Many also faced a reduction in living wages. The dam has also had a serious geological impact. Chinese officials and experts admitted at a forum in that the Three Gorges Dam had caused an array of ecological ills, including more frequent landslides, China's state news agency Xinhua reported at the time.
The water in the reservoir saturates and erodes the base of the cliffs, and the fluctuation in water levels changes the weight of the reservoir and the pressure on the slopes, destabilizing the shoreline, geologists say. Water gushes out for the first time through the Three Gorges Dam on June 11, The first disaster came in , shortly after the reservoir started to fill for the first time. Even though water is not always available in the needed quantity and quality for all people everywhere, people have learned to get and use water for all of their water needs, from drinking, cleaning, irrigating crops, producing electricity, and for just having fun.
Hydropower, or hydroenergy, is a form of renewable energy that uses the water stored in dams, as well as flowing in rivers to create electricity in hydropower plants. The falling water rotates blades of a turbine, which then spins a generator that converts the mechanical energy of the spinning turbine into electrical energy.
Hydroelectric power is a significant component of electricity So just how do we get electricity from water? Actually, hydroelectric and coal-fired power plants produce electricity in a similar way. In both cases a power source is used to turn a propeller-like piece called a turbine. Nothing is perfect on Earth, and that includes the production of electricity using flowing water. Hydroelectric-production facilities are indeed not perfect a dam costs a lot to build and also can have negative effects on the environment and local ecology , but there are a number of advantages of hydroelectric-power production as opposed to fossil-fuel power production.
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