It took China 30 years to build a dam so gigantic that it shifted the Earth’s axis and flooded 20 cities. It was worth it.

Over the past 30 years, China has gone from being a country half a century behind the rest of the world to overtaking it on the right. All its projects infrastructures They are mega projects, from their high speed rail network until its bridgesBut without a doubt the most beastly project of all is the hydroelectric power plant of the Three Gorgeson the Yangtze River (Blue River).

Chinese authorities repeated it over and over again, long before construction began in 1994. “The Three Gorges Dam will be the largest in the world”. A clearly propaganda argument for internal and external use. Even so, no one can deny its status as a colossus. It measures more than 2.3 km long y 185 meters high. And above all it has the largest hydroelectric production capacity in the worldBut all this has an ecological and human price.

A power plant that generates in one day the energy that Madrid and Barcelona together need in a month

The Three Gorges Hydroelectric Power Station, located in the heart of China, is the largest in the world, quite simply. With a capacity of 18,200 megawatts, it can produce 84.7 billion kWh of electricity per year thanks to its 32 turbines, each of which weighs 3,300 tons.

In 2021, it reached full performance and is capable of generating 0.54 TWh of electricity per daya sufficient amount for supply the 5.4 million households for one monthassuming that the average monthly electricity consumption of a family of three is 100 kWh. That is, each day it produces enough energy to supply Madrid and Barcelona together for a month.

It is such a beastly prey that it even has a boat lift of 3,000 tons. At the time of its completion in late 2015, the elevator, which was 120 metres long, 18 metres wide and 3.5 metres deep, was the largest ship elevator in the world.

This lift thus makes it possible to overcome the enormous difference in height between the two sides of the dam, which is barely higher than the Caleido Tower (Madrid) or the Sevilla Tower (Seville). In fact, it is higher than the Iberdrola tower in Bilbao or the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, ​​but the lift can raise and lower ships as if it were nothing.

A thousand-year-old dream come true

The dam is a dream that has been going on for thousands of years, according to Chinese experts. The country has always wanted to protect itself from the devastating floods of the Yangtze River. The third largest river in the world in terms of flow (30,000 cubic metres per second) and length (almost 6,300 kilometres) after the Nile and the Amazon, it is fed by almost 3,600 tributaries in a region subject to heavy rainfall.

It has always produced huge and deadly flash floods during the rainy season. The 1931 flood killed at least 150,000 people, the 1954 flood claimed almost 30,000 lives and left 19 million homeless, not to mention the devastation of more than three million hectares of farmland.

In 1919, Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China, proposed the idea of ​​a dam, which was taken up under the leadership of Mao Zedongbut it had to be abandoned due to lack of funds. It was not until the sustained economic growth of the 1980s and the support of Prime Minister Li Peng, a former hydroelectric engineer, that the project was revived. Deng Xiaoping gave the green light and Jiang Zemin carried it out.

The name of the structure, the “Three Gorges”, comes from its location downstream of three steep valleys carved by the river, spectacular and touristic. The construction of this concrete colossus lasted fifteen years, from 1994 to 2012. From the beginning it was the subject of criticism and doubts, first about the integrity of its structure, and then because of the ecological and human cost that has meant.

The construction of the dam created an upstream reservoir over 600 km long and holds back a whopping 40,000 billion liters of water. Yes, almost 40 km3 of water. It is such a huge body of water that, According to NASAhas ended up shifting the Earth’s axis of rotation by about 2 cm.

Such a reservoir caused towns, historic sites and entire valleys to be swallowed by the waters. In total, 1.4 million people They were forced to abandon their homes and lands and move to cities, sometimes even to neighbouring provinces. In some cases, several times, as in the city of Badong, located about 30 km upstream from the dam and which had to be rebuilt twice because the first site proved unstable. And this is not the only way in which the dam affects millions of people.

The reservoir, which extends 660 kilometres to the city of Chongqing, is threatening to become a giant sewer; landslides are multiplying, cities are threatened, new populations will have to be displaced and the dam is filling up with tons of sediment faster than expected.

“The dam reservoir is located in a basin with a population of 30 million inhabitants, which produces every year 1.4 billion cubic meters of wastewatertens of thousands of tons of waste and millions of floating bodies are dumped on the surface of the river, as well as fertilizers, pesticides and three chemical conglomerates are on the banks of the river,” Ecologist Wu Dengming recalledfounder of the Green League.

“Every year, the Yangtze drags 600 million tons of sediment“At this rate, the dam will be full in 70 years. Its main functions, flood prevention and electricity generation, will be affected,” he added.

The Yangtze, like many rivers, is a vital agricultural route that carries alluvial deposits to the lands it passes through, such as here on China’s central plain. However, with sediment trapped in the reservoir, its waters have become clearer, allowing more light to filter through, which encourages photosynthesis and algae blooms. In addition, the phosphate and nitrate levels The water levels in the reservoir have increased tenfold in the last ten years. The result is a proliferation of toxic algae that makes the water undrinkable in some places.

Even so, despite everything, for China “The advantages of the dam outweigh the disadvantages“as Li Yong’an, the dam’s deputy director, recalled.

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