The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, located in the Yiling District of Yichang, in Hubei province, China. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest capacity hydroelectric power station with a total generating capacity of 18,200 MW.A large dam across the Yangtze River was originally envisioned by Sun Yat-sen in The International Development of China, in 1919.
It is the virtual definition of a monumental project -- a dam one and a half miles wide and more than 600 feet high that will create a reservoir hundreds of feet deep and nearly 400 miles long. The reservoir, its engineers say, will enable 10,000-ton ocean-going freighters to sail directly into the nation's interior for six months of each year, opening a region burgeoning with agricultural and manufactured products. And the dam's hydropower turbines are expected to create as much electricity as 18 nuclear power plants
Chinese authorities hope the dam will take care of several major national problems with a single monumental stroke. The Three Gorges project is seen as an important future source of energy for China's growing electrical consumption. It is also expected to tame the fabled Yangzi River. The Yangzi's notorious floods have been recorded for millennia and have claimed more than 1 million lives in the past 100 years.
Known to most Chinese as Chang Jiang (Long River), the Yangzi at 3,937 miles is the third longest river in the world behind the Nile and the Amazon.
Chinese and foreign scientists, meanwhile, warned that the dam could endanger the area's remaining residents. Among their concerns: landslides caused by increased pressure on the surrounding land, a rise in waterborne disease, and a decline in biodiversity. But their words fell on deaf ears. Harnessing the power of the Yangtze has been a goal since Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen first proposed the idea in 1919. Mao Zedong, the father of China's communist revolution, rhapsodized the dam in a poem. The mega- project could not be realized in his lifetime, however, because the country's resources were exhausted by the economic failures of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and then the social upheaval of the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s a to the early 1970s. Four decades later, the government resuscitated Mao's plans. The first of the Yangtze's famed gorges—a collection of steep bluffs at a bend in the river—was determined to be the perfect site.
