Apart, three Gorges Dam. The last colossal infrastructure project in China, if completed, will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, on the Tibetan plateau on the border with India.
China says that the Motuo Hydroelectric Station that is building in the Tibet is key to its effort to meet the clean energy objectives. Beijing also sees infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the slow Chinese economy and create jobs.
But this project has raised concerns between the environmentalists and the residents of China, in part, because Beijing has said very little about it.
The area where the dam is built is prone to earthquakes. The Tibetan river is in excess, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows to the Indian neighbor as Brahmaputra and Bangladesh as Jamuna, which generates concerns in those countries about water safety.
What is known about the project?
China announced at the end of December that the government had approved the construction of the Motuo project in the lowest sections of Yarlung Tsangpo, but has published few details about it. That includes the cost of the project, where the money will come, which companies are involved and how many people are probably displaced.
What is known is that the dam will be in Medog County in the Tibet, in a steep barrel where the river makes a horseshoe know like the great BLB, then approximately 6,500 feet falls into approximately 30 miles.
By taking advantage of the kinetic energy of that fall, the hydroelectric power station could generate 300 billion kilovatos of energy per year, the Power Construction Corporation of China of state property, or powerchina, estimated at 2020. That would be triple the Capacity of the three Gorges DAM, currently the largest in the world, which cost China about $ 34 billion to build.
China has not revealed which company is building the dam, but some analysts say that Powerchina, the largest hydroelectric infrastructure builder in the country, is probably involved. The company did not respond to comments requests.
Experts say that construction in Great Bend, a 500 -meter deep cannon without roads, would probably take a decade due to technical challenges.
The basic design of the dam is even unknown.
According to the Xiao fan, a senior engineer from the Sichuan Geology Office who spoke with the New York Times, a proposal, which saw as a probable approach, implied the construction of a dam near the top of the large curve and diverting the water through huge tunnels perforated in the cannon.
The main leader of China, Xi Jinping, has promised that the country’s carbon emissions will reach its maximum point around 2030, since it replaces coal with renewable energy sources. The ruler Communist Party, who uses massive public works projects to show his skill in engineering, has studied for years the ways of taking advantage of the power of Yarlung Tsangpo.
Are there environmental risks?
The same forces that created the Risks Great Bles pose for the dam that China is building on it. The Tibetan plateau was formed by a collision between the Indian and Euratic tectonic plates millions of years ago. To this day, the Indian plaque is still slowly moving towards Eurasia, so the Himalayas are regularly run over by earthquakes.
Such seismic events threaten the safety of dams. Chinese officials said the cracks appeared in five hydroelectric dams in the Tibet after an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 beaten near the city of Shigatse this month, killing more than 120 people.
Even if the motuo dam is built well enough to resist an earthquake, landslides and clay flows resulting from earthquakes are difficult to contain and can kill people who live nearby. Experts say that the mass excavation involved in the construction of dams could make such disasters more likely.
What about people living there?
It is difficult to know how Tibetans and members of other smaller ethnic groups living in the area. The Tibet is closely restricted by the Communist Party, which has encouraged the Chinese have moved to the plateau and strictly control the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet is open to foreigners only for permission, and is generally out of the limits for foreign journalists.
In the past, Tibetans have maintained protests against projects of the hydroelectric dam that threatened to move them, including a demonstration last year In the province of Sichuan, according to a news report.
The Motuo Dam project is expected to bring more changes to Medog, which was once the most remote county in China. The government has built roads in the region that has attracted tourists and adventure travelers in recent years, according to Matthew Akester, a Tibet researcher with headquarters in India.
Now, people will have to be relocated to give way to the dam, which may require cultivation land and cities to submerge. It is not clear how many people could be affected. Through It has a population of 15,000.
Tibet, who is vast but scarcely populated, does not need much energy, and the estimated capacity of the dam would also exceed what the neighboring provinces require, said Mr. Fan. The nearby Sichuan and Yunnan have many hydroelectric plants, producing more energy than the region it needs. And sending power to long distances to other parts of China would be expensive.
How are India and Bangladesh reacting?
The dam could affect people who live downstream in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, as well as in Bangladesh. If the dam crings the sediment, that would make the ground along the downstream river be less fertile and erosione the banks and the coasts in India, he said Dr. Kalyan Rudra, Professor of River Sciences and President of the Western Bengal Control Control Board, a government agency.
Scientists in India and Bangladesh have asked China to share details of their plans so that they can better evaluate project risks. Indian diplomats have also urged Beijing to ensure that the project does not damage the downstream states. China says he has taken measures to avoid negative consequences for his neighbors.
China’s secret is feeding distrust, Donnellon-May, a researcher at the Oxford Global Society based in the United Kingdom that studies water policy and environmental conflict said. “Without Beijing, releasing hydrological data and detailed plans for the dam, India and Bangladesh are in the dark, so it is more difficult to prepare to mitigate any potential impact of it,” he said.
Both China and India have accused of trying to exercise control over water resources to obtain strategic or economic profits, what some experts and officials call “hydrohegemonia.” The dam could be seen as a way of projecting Chinese power near the border in dispute with India, even in Arunachal Pradesh, which China affirms as its territory.
Because it is upstream, “China can make decisions that directly affect the flow of water downstream, increasing fears in India,” said Donnellon-May.
Some Indian officials have proposed to build a large dam in a Brahmaputra tributary to store water and counteract any reduction in the flow that the Tibet dam can cause. But Dr. Rudra, of the Western Bengal Pollution Control Board, said such a dam could cause the same problems with fertility and soil erosion.
Saif HASNAT Contributed reports. Li Contributed research.
