For several years to come, though, the diverted waters at the Three Gorges will run fast.
His remarks, widely reported in China, seemed to imply that serious problems are brewing at the Three Gorges.
Voith Hydro, makers of the vast turbines fitted to gargantuan dams like the Three Gorges in China, is also involved.
Environmental activists concede that the Three Gorges Dam is already a reality, and no amount of criticism will make it go away.
Residents point to a spot where they say the factory dumps polluted water at night, which flows into the Three Gorges Reservoir.
The meeting was inaugurated in presence of Mr Shan, director of the Chinese State Administration of Heritage in the Three Gorges museum.
Perhaps no project better exemplifies this challenge than the Three Gorges Dam.
At the end of a Yangtze cruise, you can also visit The Three Gorges Dam, which is one of the most spectacular modern engineering feats.
First, China is not a monolith, and decision-making there can also be painfully slow (for example, the Three Gorges project was first mooted in the 1920s).
Like the Great Wall or, more recently, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River it's a classic imperial project, still possible under China's one-party system.
In China it's putting up an 800, 000-volt line, the most powerful ever, to move 6.4 gigawatts 1, 300 miles from a station near the Three Gorges Dam to Shanghai.
Promoting the power-generation aspect of the Three Gorges project may have seemed a good way to counter the criticisms made by the dam's opponents, and the suspicions of potential investors.
Later this year the Yangzi will be blocked and diverted at the site of the Three Gorges dam, a giant project that will turn the 600 kilometres below Chongqing into a lake.
On his most recent visit to the dam site, in October, Mr Li sang his familiar song of praise for the Three Gorges: the dam had sound science and public support behind it.
The company is involved in two more dams, in Uganda and Laos, which are expected to receive World Bank funding, and it has helped build enormous reservoirs such as the Three Gorges Dam in China.
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But then I looked at a column in another newspaper, and it said that only 18.6% of the eco projects involving the Three Gorges Dam have been tackled, and that due to the economy, they may not be finished for another 10 years.
However, some of those projects, such as the gigantic Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River, due to start generating power in 2009, have created a separate set of environmental problems.
Authorities also said that no damage was observed at the massive Three Gorges Dam, located on the Yangtze River, several hundred kilometres east of the epicentre.
Hundreds of acres of virgin rainforest gets flooded and 20, 000 people will have to move (compared with 1.3 million during the building of Three Gorges Dam in China).
Companies involved in the accusations include China Three Gorges Corp and China Unicom (CHU).
That overtakes the second-place Three Gorges Dam, which cost a mere 203.9 billion yuan.
That may be just as well, given the spate of unfavourable publicity Three Gorges has received of late.
The two countries share the Itaipu hydroelectric dam (still the world's largest until China's Three Gorges is completed).
The scale of the dam it will be the world's third-largest hydroelectric station after China's Three Gorges and Brazil's own Itaipu is epic.
Tanaka suggested that for starters the world needs each year to build 90 utility-scale concentrated solar plants, 17, 000 windmills, two Three Gorges Dams, and 18 nuclear plants.
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