Fact Check: Three gorges dam demolition

A November 16 Xinhua report, also available on the People's Daily Web site, notes that the cost so far of building the Three Gorges Project has totaled 130 billion yuan (about $16.11 billion), including funds set aside to restructure local industry and to help resettle firms, migrants, and ...

China on Monday began construction of a mega waterway project, including what is expected to become the world's largest inland ship lock, in response to the rising shipping demand along the Yangtze, the world's third-longest river.

The Three Gorges Dam, officially ... of the Three Gorges. It is also the world's largest power station by installed capacity (22,500 MW); it generates 95±20 TWh of electricity per year on average, depending on the amount of precipitation in the river basin. After the monsoons of 2020, the dam produced nearly 112 TWh in a year, breaking the record of 103 TWh set by the Itaipu Dam in 2016. The dam's body, 185 meters high and 2,309 meters wide, was completed in 2006. The power plant became fully operational ...

The official price tag came to about $24 billion, though some outside analysts have estimated the true cost could have been double that figure when accounting for resettlement expenses, environmental remediation, and infrastructure rebuilding ...

Scientists now believe that this process at the Zipingpu dam in Sichuan may have triggered the May 12, 2008 earthquake that killed 90,000 Chinese citizens and are poring over data to determine the dynamic effect of the dam’s reservoir levels on seismic activity leading up to and including the enormous M7.9 earthquake. The Three Gorges reservoir levels are important for reasons of public safety. But they also serve as an important indicator of the dam’s failure to deliver its promised goals: insufficient water cannot generate the electricity revenues to cover the cost of dam construction, or facilitate shipping upstream to the port of Chongqing.

While intended to provide flood protection, its effectiveness is debated. The Three Gorges Dam has been a controversial project, resulting in the displacement of approximately 1.3 million people and the destruction of natural features as well as architectural and archeological sites.

There were also fears—some of which were borne out—that human and industrial waste from cities would pollute the reservoir and even that the huge amount of water impounded in the reservoir could trigger earthquakes and landslides. Some Chinese and foreign engineers argued that a number of smaller and far cheaper and less-problematic dams on the Yangtze tributaries could generate as much power as the Three Gorges Dam and control flooding equally well.

Shortly after the essay appeared, Qian retracted his conclusions, declared his support for the project, and traveled in person to the dam site to apologize. Whatever private calculation drove that reversal, the public record shows a scientist of the highest rank forced to disown his own engineering judgment. Construction began in 1994. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

The Chinese government faced an interesting challenge: they needed to prove that the imagery was wrong, not the dam. That’s a hard sell when people can see the “evidence” with their own eyes. The Three Gorges Dam incident isn’t just an interesting case study—it’s a warning about the real-world consequences of inadequate image processing across professional applications.