Soaking in your own bathwater

So apparently the brilliant engineering feat of the decade, the Three Gorges Dam, (regular readers know TAE loathes dams with every fiber of his being) has turned into an ad hoc trash collection system for most of southern China.

Basically, all the rain that has been pouring in China has washed every bit of trash possible out into the river system. The trash then heads downstream until something blocks its path. In this case, the thing blocking its path is the single largest concrete structure in the world. Right now, an estimated 3000 tons of trash are being pulled from above the dam every day...and they aren't keeping up.

But let's keep the focus on the Three Gorges Dam for a minute. The justification for the dam was the control of flooding; the dam reservoir acts as a buffer for flash floods, making flow downstream of the dam more constant. It also houses a huge hydroelectric plant inside it, producing gobs of power. These are both seemingly noble causes. It would be a wonderful thing if the Chinese government cared about its people enough to spend billions subverting flood risks as well as cared about the environment enough to build green energy plants.
However...

In order to build the dam, the Chinese government displaced nearly 1.3 million of its citizens, a number far higher than the number killed by flooding of the Yangtze river. Over a thousand important religious and archaeological sites were set to be submerged by the reservoir above the dam. Some were picked up and moved to higher ground, others weren't. Entire cities disappeared underwater. Those residents were relocated to vast concrete cities.
And as far as China's potential dedication to the earth via green energy...consider the river dolphin driven extinct by the Dam. Or the critically endangered Siberian Crane who's nesting grounds were submerged.
But most striking indeed is that this massive project, at full capacity, provides less than 2% of China's energy requirements, and that number decreases every day as the demands of the increasingly industrialized country continue to spike. How does China meet all its new power demands? By building one coal power plant a week for a decade straight, and becoming the single largest consumer of coal. Less than 15% of those coal plants have any desulphurization technology.


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