Taming the River Wild

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Chinese leaders argue just as vehemently that Three Gorges is vital to their country's future -- and actually good for the environment as a whole. They say it will prevent the periodic flooding that has claimed 500,000 lives in this century. More important, its production of clean hydroelectric power will reduce China's reliance on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, which now supplies 75% of the country's energy needs. The burning of coal has cast a pall of pollution over major Chinese cities and helped make pulmonary disease the nation's leading cause of death.

The issue is how a rapidly growing nation of 1.2 billion people, all of whom would like refrigerators and other conveniences, can promote economic development without wrecking its environment. For the Chinese government, hydropower in general and Three Gorges in particular are a big part of the solution. "The advantages outweigh the disadvantages," contends He Gong, vice president of the China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corp.

How China meets its energy needs has an impact far beyond its boundaries. Sulfurous emissions from Chinese power plants and factories blow eastward and fall as acid rain on Japan and Korea. In fact, the pollution has planet-wide + implications: China is the world's second-largest producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere and may, many scientists believe, lead to global warming. If China maintains its annual economic growth rate of 11%, the country will need to add 17,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity each year for the rest of the decade. Within 10 years, that would be as much new power as the U.S. generates overall today. If China uses mostly coal to produce that power, the greenhouse effect could be catastrophic.

Many opponents of Three Gorges have no quarrel with the effort to move away from coal toward hydropower. But they argue that for a lower price, numerous smaller dams could produce more power and greater flood-control benefits. They fear that a dam so large on the notoriously muddy Yangtze will lead to dangerous buildups of silt in some parts of the river, creating new obstacles to navigation and causing floods upstream. Chinese officials respond that both big and small dams are needed. Indeed, 10 projects smaller than Three Gorges, with a total capacity of nearly 12,000 megawatts, are under construction on the upper reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries.

Whether or not Three Gorges is ever finished, hydropower can never meet the bulk of China's energy needs. Part of the problem is that most of the potential dam sites are in the less populated southwestern part of the country, making it expensive to transmit electricity to the industrial north and east. Experts say hydropower will account for no more than 20% of China's electricity generation by 2010.