China began damming the Jinsha River on Wednesday to build the Xiluodu hydropower plant, the second largest of its type next to only the massive Three Gorges Project.
The damming started at 9:30 a.m. and is expected to last 36 hours at Xiluodu where the river is 47 meters wide, said Wang Shukai, vice director of the project under the China Three Gorges Project Corporation.
The river's runoff reached 3,520 cubic meters per second, up from an estimated 3,200 cubic meters, due to rainfall in the upper reaches of the waterway.
Earlier, workers had burrowed five channels into mountains located upstream and diverted more than half of the water to bypass the dam.
With a designed installed capacity of 12.6 million kilowatts, the Xiluodu plant will be the nation's second largest hydropower plant after the Three Gorges Plant. When completed, it will be the third largest of its type in the world.
The plant located in the country's southwest will provide power for the dynamic economies of central and east China. It is also a subsidiary project to the Three Gorges Project in terms of flood control.
When completed, the dam will be 278 meters high with a reservoir containing 11.57 billion cubic meters of water.
The project, being built with an investment of 50.34 billion yuan ( 6.76 billion U. S. dollars), started construction in 2005 and is expected to be operational in 2015. It will help increase the capacity of the Three Gorges plant and the Gezhouba plant by 379,200 kilowatts, and enable them to generate 1.88 billion kwh more power during the low-water season.
Jinsha River, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, flows between Yushu in Qinghai Province and Yibin in Sichuan Province. Xiluodu plant is the first major hydropower project on the Jinsha River that is seen as having excellent potential for hydropower resources.
China has plans to build a dozen power plants, including the Xidukou plant on the upper Yangtze stretch that is home to the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers.