NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. Diverting rivers is always worse, because it means youre affecting every point downstream on the river. And you're just distributing an already shared water resource--you're not actually CREATING any new resource.
This idea does not do that, it takes freshwater which otherwise would have been spat out into the Bay of Bengal, and just puts it elsewhere. Freshwater which would have otherwise been turned into saltwater, gets to be freshwater instead.
It WILL affect wildlife off the Bengal coast. It would turn from a saltwater bay into a huge freshwater lake. Fishermen would have to transition to catching freshwater fish, but in return, they get to NOT DIE from massive flooding, and other places in Asia also get multiple Germanies worth of arable land.
South Korea also already built something similar, and is using it (Saemangeum dike). It only cost 2.6 billion dollars. The Bengal dike would have to be about 10x longer and 10x deeper, let's say $260 billion, and just for the hell of it let's say it costs 3x more for various reasons, at a total of $750 billion. but surely China can afford something that costs less than a trillion dollars, and gives them a Germany worth of arable land?
TLDR: NAWAPA wanted to export already-existing Canadian freshwater to the US. Bengal dam takes unused freshwater from the Bay of Bengal, and puts it somewhere else, also prevents global warming from killing 400 million Bengalis.
it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry
If you look at what NAWAPA was trying to do, it was very different. They wanted to dam SEVERAL rivers and divert them. Many of the complaints were about disrupting the flow of the rivers.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. The Bengal plan does not divert rivers.
The Bengal plan dams the whole bay. The rivers are completely untouched. The equivalent of this would be damming the Arctic/North Alaskan areas where the rivers drain, and then sending that water back into North America.
(no such proposal was ever made, probably because these drainage areas are SO FAR away from the Arizona desert--Asia lucks out here because Bengal is so much closer).
No, it's NOT the same logic, because when you divert a river, downstream flow is affected and the water's altitude is lower. Certain branches of the river can go completely dry because of this.
NAWAPA was purely about water. Bengal is about water, but ALSO about preventing the catastrophic flooding that NECESSARILY WILL happen to 300,000,000+ people if you do nothing. Building it is a twofer, basically
Also, the Bay of Bengal gets 2.5x more rainfall than the Alaskan coast. And the Brahmaputra-Ganges-Meghna's discharge is 4x bigger than all the combined rivers of Alaska/Canada. So the bang-for-the-buck is way higher too.
And in addition to all that, China and India simply need more land, far more urgently than the US. China also has far more capacity to build something like that than the US.
The Bengal plan WOULD have environmental effects, but only for the actual Bay reservoir area. Not for the land/riverine areas. And the effects would simply be a matter of quality, not quantity. Rather than forests running dry and being deprived of a precious resource, it would simply be a seawater habitat turning into a freshwater one. The engineering would be equally unimaginable though, yes. But the EU is looking at a North Sea dam which would actually be a lot more difficult to build than this.
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin ... Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:
then there's the fact we'll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause---the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they're gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it'd be a shame to not build great monuments down here
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin … Thats NAWAPA shit
yea, creating the artificial river is the part of the proposal that I haven't really checked numerically, and probably would be the hardest part, but it still feels doable within the timescale of 2 decades. Intuitively, it feels like they'd have a few pumping stations across Bangladesh, then one heavy-duty one to pump it up onto Tibet, and from there send it down a dynamited-carved river.
then there’s the fact we’ll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause—the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems
not that much. There wouldn't be any less water in the ocean, so rainfall patterns would be unaffected. Ocean currents would be barely affected, it's a very small sliver of the entire Bay of Bengal, and a very shallow depth. The only changed ecosystem would be that within the reservoir, and some tiny local spots right next to it.
In exchange you get to create 2 Germxny's worth of green land in the desert. It would only add water to the atmosphere there which didn't exist before.
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it
Intuitively, it feels like they’d have a few pumping stations across Bangladesh, then one heavy-duty one to pump it up onto Tibet, and from there send it down a dynamited-carved river.
that "heavy-duty pump" is going to be an enormous fucking project and the power it needs is astronomical. im talking a fusion plant.
and that simple canal is going through rough shit, its not like digging the all-american canal. and then there's the Kunlun to get over too.
Yes, it's a lot. But this is the country that built the biggest rail system on earth in a decade. I feel that it's doable, and that infrastructure experts should analyze the idea
this undertaking would make the rail system look like childsplay. the two largest lift systems ever devised (in terms of volume & vertical distance) serving the longest canal system ever built.
this sort of thing afaik has never been done. diverting water in a mountainrange to a different watershed is one thing, taking water from close to sealevel and pumping it up thousands of meters... even the passage from Tibet to the Tarim basin will be the world's largest.
Did some calcs and the cost of pumping that amount of water (the entire Brahmaputra system) up to the Tibetan plateau (18,000 ft) would be $2.3 trillion/year
Considering there are several other workarounds, like going around Tibet instead of across, or carving a river into the plateau which is only 5000ft elevated or something, this cost could be brought down to $600 billion/year.
The Bengal dam itself would cost $500 billion at most, judging from the North Sea dam estimates.
The cost of the infrastructure (aka artificial river) for transporting the water, based on the costs and water volume capacity of the Suez Canal (but scaled up to the Brahmaputra's size), would be $6 trillion.
So basically China would spend $6.5 trillion on this project, over a span of let's say 6 years to get the entire thing built. And then once built, It would take 6 years at $600B/yr of pumping water (or 12 years at $300B/yr, with India using the other half of the freshwater)
Would China be willing to sacrifice $1 trillion/year for 18 years to acquire a Germany?
this is necessarily back-of-the-envelope on both our parts but 1 trillion a year in energy cost alone appears to be more than the entire united states uses in a year :what-the-hell:
which is why i haven't emphasized money, this stuff is beyond legal fictions you're butting up against engineering and technological limits. i can't even get a ballpark on how many fusion plants you'd need to make this happen because the technology isn't close to that state.
and lets talk 'path of least resistance', going around is probably impossible. criss-crossing that many watersheds without messing them up (having to pipe/tunnel this enormous amount of water)would get absurd & you can't even avoid having to elevate up onto the Iranian plateau, and then up thru the Fergana valley---add to this the fact most of the regions you have to pass on the roundtrip are just as arid & would want that water just as much so why bother going so far?
the idea of burrowing through and avoiding lifting any more than you have to has been assumed in all my estimates. and it's still in the realm of magic engineering.
but speaking of exploiting a sudden surplus in freshwater from a project on the indian side of the himalayas, sending it to arid regions in India is infinitely more possible and less trouble. I'd modify the plan to (the still extremely ambitious target) Thar Desert, or completely fabricating some new intense agricultural operations on the river & lake and nearby. If you're worried for how China should benefit from that, they can get shipped produce from it
NAWAPA but 20x as expensive and destructive. I love it.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. Diverting rivers is always worse, because it means youre affecting every point downstream on the river. And you're just distributing an already shared water resource--you're not actually CREATING any new resource.
This idea does not do that, it takes freshwater which otherwise would have been spat out into the Bay of Bengal, and just puts it elsewhere. Freshwater which would have otherwise been turned into saltwater, gets to be freshwater instead.
It WILL affect wildlife off the Bengal coast. It would turn from a saltwater bay into a huge freshwater lake. Fishermen would have to transition to catching freshwater fish, but in return, they get to NOT DIE from massive flooding, and other places in Asia also get multiple Germanies worth of arable land.
South Korea also already built something similar, and is using it (Saemangeum dike). It only cost 2.6 billion dollars. The Bengal dike would have to be about 10x longer and 10x deeper, let's say $260 billion, and just for the hell of it let's say it costs 3x more for various reasons, at a total of $750 billion. but surely China can afford something that costs less than a trillion dollars, and gives them a Germany worth of arable land?
TLDR: NAWAPA wanted to export already-existing Canadian freshwater to the US. Bengal dam takes unused freshwater from the Bay of Bengal, and puts it somewhere else, also prevents global warming from killing 400 million Bengalis.
it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry
If you look at what NAWAPA was trying to do, it was very different. They wanted to dam SEVERAL rivers and divert them. Many of the complaints were about disrupting the flow of the rivers.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. The Bengal plan does not divert rivers.
The Bengal plan dams the whole bay. The rivers are completely untouched. The equivalent of this would be damming the Arctic/North Alaskan areas where the rivers drain, and then sending that water back into North America.
(no such proposal was ever made, probably because these drainage areas are SO FAR away from the Arizona desert--Asia lucks out here because Bengal is so much closer).
No, it's NOT the same logic, because when you divert a river, downstream flow is affected and the water's altitude is lower. Certain branches of the river can go completely dry because of this.
NAWAPA was purely about water. Bengal is about water, but ALSO about preventing the catastrophic flooding that NECESSARILY WILL happen to 300,000,000+ people if you do nothing. Building it is a twofer, basically
Also, the Bay of Bengal gets 2.5x more rainfall than the Alaskan coast. And the Brahmaputra-Ganges-Meghna's discharge is 4x bigger than all the combined rivers of Alaska/Canada. So the bang-for-the-buck is way higher too.
And in addition to all that, China and India simply need more land, far more urgently than the US. China also has far more capacity to build something like that than the US.
The Bengal plan WOULD have environmental effects, but only for the actual Bay reservoir area. Not for the land/riverine areas. And the effects would simply be a matter of quality, not quantity. Rather than forests running dry and being deprived of a precious resource, it would simply be a seawater habitat turning into a freshwater one. The engineering would be equally unimaginable though, yes. But the EU is looking at a North Sea dam which would actually be a lot more difficult to build than this.
the dam part is perfectly feasible.
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin ... Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:
then there's the fact we'll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause---the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they're gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it'd be a shame to not build great monuments down here
yea, creating the artificial river is the part of the proposal that I haven't really checked numerically, and probably would be the hardest part, but it still feels doable within the timescale of 2 decades. Intuitively, it feels like they'd have a few pumping stations across Bangladesh, then one heavy-duty one to pump it up onto Tibet, and from there send it down a dynamited-carved river.
not that much. There wouldn't be any less water in the ocean, so rainfall patterns would be unaffected. Ocean currents would be barely affected, it's a very small sliver of the entire Bay of Bengal, and a very shallow depth. The only changed ecosystem would be that within the reservoir, and some tiny local spots right next to it.
In exchange you get to create 2 Germxny's worth of green land in the desert. It would only add water to the atmosphere there which didn't exist before.
now that's what I like to hear.
that "heavy-duty pump" is going to be an enormous fucking project and the power it needs is astronomical. im talking a fusion plant.
and that simple canal is going through rough shit, its not like digging the all-american canal. and then there's the Kunlun to get over too.
Yes, it's a lot. But this is the country that built the biggest rail system on earth in a decade. I feel that it's doable, and that infrastructure experts should analyze the idea
this undertaking would make the rail system look like childsplay. the two largest lift systems ever devised (in terms of volume & vertical distance) serving the longest canal system ever built.
this sort of thing afaik has never been done. diverting water in a mountainrange to a different watershed is one thing, taking water from close to sealevel and pumping it up thousands of meters... even the passage from Tibet to the Tarim basin will be the world's largest.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-pumping-costs-d_1527.html
Did some calcs and the cost of pumping that amount of water (the entire Brahmaputra system) up to the Tibetan plateau (18,000 ft) would be $2.3 trillion/year
Considering there are several other workarounds, like going around Tibet instead of across, or carving a river into the plateau which is only 5000ft elevated or something, this cost could be brought down to $600 billion/year.
The Bengal dam itself would cost $500 billion at most, judging from the North Sea dam estimates.
The cost of the infrastructure (aka artificial river) for transporting the water, based on the costs and water volume capacity of the Suez Canal (but scaled up to the Brahmaputra's size), would be $6 trillion.
So basically China would spend $6.5 trillion on this project, over a span of let's say 6 years to get the entire thing built. And then once built, It would take 6 years at $600B/yr of pumping water (or 12 years at $300B/yr, with India using the other half of the freshwater)
Would China be willing to sacrifice $1 trillion/year for 18 years to acquire a Germany?
this is necessarily back-of-the-envelope on both our parts but 1 trillion a year in energy cost alone appears to be more than the entire united states uses in a year :what-the-hell:
which is why i haven't emphasized money, this stuff is beyond legal fictions you're butting up against engineering and technological limits. i can't even get a ballpark on how many fusion plants you'd need to make this happen because the technology isn't close to that state.
and lets talk 'path of least resistance', going around is probably impossible. criss-crossing that many watersheds without messing them up (having to pipe/tunnel this enormous amount of water)would get absurd & you can't even avoid having to elevate up onto the Iranian plateau, and then up thru the Fergana valley---add to this the fact most of the regions you have to pass on the roundtrip are just as arid & would want that water just as much so why bother going so far?
the idea of burrowing through and avoiding lifting any more than you have to has been assumed in all my estimates. and it's still in the realm of magic engineering.
but speaking of exploiting a sudden surplus in freshwater from a project on the indian side of the himalayas, sending it to arid regions in India is infinitely more possible and less trouble. I'd modify the plan to (the still extremely ambitious target) Thar Desert, or completely fabricating some new intense agricultural operations on the river & lake and nearby. If you're worried for how China should benefit from that, they can get shipped produce from it
Pretty sure deserts are bad for the climate