Megawatt Monolith

The name means "the place of the singing stone" in the language of the Guaraní Indians. Now Itaipu has a new significance: it is the name of the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, an $18.5 billion structure that was officially dedicated last week by Brazilian President João Baptista Figueiredo and his Paraguayan counterpart, Alfredo Stroessner. Said Figueiredo after the two heads of state pulled a lever opening the dam's orange-colored floodgates: "This is an example for developing countries. Itaipu shows that our people are capable of developing our own technology."

Itaipu is a binational public work of truly pharaonic proportions. More than 640 ft. high, its concrete, earthwork and rock construction stretches for almost five miles across the 2,050-mile-long Paraná River, which divides Brazil and Paraguay. Its central concrete span alone stretches 4,059 ft., more than three-quarters of the entire length of the largest U.S. dam, the Grand Coulee. More than 15.6 million cu. yds. of cement went into the construction, enough to build eight medium-size Brazilian cities. The dam's 18 turbines, weighing 300 tons apiece, are so large that the Symphony Orchestra of Brazil once managed to stage a performance inside one of them as it traveled to the dam site. Itaipu's reservoir has submerged more than 563 sq. mi. of tropical forests and farm land, and also drowned one of South America's most impressive natural cataracts, Sete Quedas. As gargantuan as Itaipu's physical dimensions is its potential output of 12,600 megawatts. That is twice the power of the Grand Coulee and six times that of Egypt's Aswan High Dam.

Itaipu has taken seven years to build, and even so will not be producing at full capacity until 1989. Nonetheless, the completion of the project is clearly a long-term boon for energy-hungry Brazil, which will channel much of the dam's power to the industrial state of Sao Paulo, 660 miles away. Saddled with more than $80 billion in foreign debt, Brazil currently imports 750,000 bbl. a day of crude oil, at a cost of more than $27 million a day. Eventually, the mammoth dam could be the equivalent of a 600,000-bbl.-a-year oil well.