Submitted by Experience Not Logic Blog

There’s a fine article at Scientific American on the Three Gorges Dam, China’s Three Gorges Dam: An Environmental Catastrophe?, with the subtitle, “Even the Chinese government suspects the massive dam may cause significant environmental damage.” There’s no disputing that the Three Gorges Dam is an impressive, useful, feat of engineering. The game designers in Civilization IV even made it a world wonder ranking the dam up there with the Parthenon, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Pyramids of Giza. So, let’s begin with the good of the dam and then move into the environmental troubles it is creating.

Three Gorges has two great things going for it, aside from a demonstration of China’s engineering:

• The dam generates power, a lot of power. 18,000 megawatts upon completion, to be precise. To be less precise, and more visual, that’s around 8 times the power output of the Hoover Dam.
• The power Three Gorges generates is clean, real clean, especially in comparison to the coal-fired energy that provides 82% of China’s energy. China currently gets 7.2% of its electricity from renewable sources, and China plans on using dams for 1/3 of its goal of getting 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The Scientific American article says that all of this clean energy is coming at a potentially hefty environmental price. Much of the worst damage is speculative, but what has happened already is still serious. The areas of greatest concern are: landslides, decreases in biodiversity, and disease and Drought.

• Landslides
  • A month after the first of three incremental water fills 20 million cubic meters of rock fell into the Qinggan River making 20-meter waves that killed 14 people.
  • Last November, a 3,050 cubic meter slide buried a bus killing at least 30 people.
  • The same displacement of land that has been causing landslides may result in earthquakes as water pressure mounts on the numerous fault lines in the Three Gorges area.
• Decrease in Biodiversity
  • China “is home to 10 percent of the world’s vascular plants (those with stems, roots and leaves) and biologists estimate that half of China’s animal and plant species … are found no where else in the world. The Three Gorges area alone accounts for 20 percent of Chinese seed plants–more than 6,000 species.”
  • The Three Gorges dam threatens the habitats of over 400 plant species
  • Of the Yangtze’s 177 unique fish species, 25 are already endangered from overfishing, and the rest are threatened as their natural flood plain habitat disappears into a network of lakes
  • BUT, the effects of the dam on biodiversity cannot be truly be determine until long-term data on the effects of the dam have been collected
• Disease and Drought
  • With the Yangtze reaching “its lowest level in 142 years,” there is evidence that the dam may be “spurring drought in central and eastern China.”
  • Decreased fresh water flow is resulting in salt water pushing further inland.
  • There has been a “spike in schistosomiasis [a human blood parasite released by freshwater snails].”
    • Further study is needed to determine if other diseases are spiking.

Is this simply the price of progress and clean energy?