China approves giant dam project in Tibet

An aerial view of a section of the Yarlung Tsangpo River on May 13, 2023, in Medog District, Nyingchi, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. LI LIN/CHINA NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMA High on the Tibetan plateau, where the Brahmaputra River is still called Yarlung Tsangpo, China aims to build an imposing and complex dam, possibly the most powerful on the planet. The Xinhua news agency announced, Wednesday, December 25, the government’s approval of this project, which has been discussed for several years, a further step in the Chinese race to build hydroelectric reservoirs at the top of Asia’s great rivers. The Power Construction Corporation of China estimated in 2020 that this structure, the Motuo dam, could have a capacity of 60 gigawatts, or triple the Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world. “This is a major contribution to China’s transition to green and low-carbon energy,” the official agency argued on Wednesday. The river has its source in the Tibet Autonomous Region which it crosses from west to east. It forms the deepest canyon in the world, hence China’s interest in its hydraulic pressure, particularly on a section where it loses 2,000 meters of elevation over a distance of only 50 kilometers. It is there, while the river makes a major turn, that Chinese engineers are said to dig tunnels around twenty kilometers long through a mountain, the Himalayan peak Namcha Barwa, 7,782 meters high, to divert half of the current towards turbines and find the course lower. The river, the highest in the world, then enters India in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, an area of ​​which is disputed between Beijing and Delhi, before crossing Assam and arriving in Bangladesh. You have 68.39% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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