From Reuters via the Washington Post (link):
Construction on China’s Three Gorges Dam is set to finish next week but its critics warn the lessons about the environmental consequences of the world’s largest hydropower project have yet to be learned.
With the last of the concrete being poured nearly a decade after China stemmed the flow of the Yangtze River to begin work, environmentalists say it should provide a cautionary tale to an energy-hungry government pushing similar hydropower dam projects.
China says the Three Gorges will tame flooding on the mighty Yangtze, whose waters have claimed 300,000 lives in the 20th century, fuel industrial growth in the area and improve shipping — as well as having a generating capacity of 18 gigawatts when it is complete in 2009.
See also – Salon.com’s “The tragedy of tiger leaping gorge,” another river dammed for hydropower generation (link); – the New York Times’ “Dam building threatens China’s ‘Grand Canyon'” about a damming project of the Nu River, one of the last two free flowing rivers in China (link)
