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Chongqing – Serious pollutants such as radioactive waste, and hospital refuse that could cause infectious diseases, risk being overlooked in the Three Gorges reservoir cleanup, a senior member of China’s non-Communist advisory body, the CPPCC, has warned.

Wei Siqi, vice-chairman of the Chongqing committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), told a recent meeting of the group that the cleanup campaign is concentrating on the removal of buildings, bridges, trees and other objects that could impede navigation in the future reservoir. But more attention must be paid to dangerous materials such as radioactive debris from industry, as well as waste from homes and hospitals that could cause infectious and endemic diseases, China News Service (Zhongguo xinwen she) quoted Mr. Wei as saying.

Some 1,967 hospitals and animal clinics are located in the area to be flooded when the Three Gorges reservoir begins filling with water next year, the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television Network reported earlier this month.

Mr. Wei, who is part of an advisory group monitoring the reservoir cleanup, gave no further information about the sources of the radioactive waste. This is a particularly hazardous type of debris, with some kinds remaining radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. In general, such waste is a by-product of nuclear-power generation and nuclear-weapons production, and of activities that support these industries, such as research, and uranium mining and processing. Low-level radioactive waste can also be generated by medical procedures and research.

Turning to other problems, Mr. Wei said in his address to the CPPCC meeting that there has to date been little real understanding of the bottom of the reservoir; that the exact goals of the cleanup operation, and overall responsibility for it, have been unclear; that insufficient funds are available for the undertaking; and that standards governing the work are inconsistent among the various districts involved.

He said that with local residents being moved out before the cleanup commences, the operation is being conducted the wrong way around, and valuable local knowledge of where dangerous pollutants are located is being lost as a result. Poisonous materials left buried under the bed of the future reservoir could become hidden troublemakers and even “time bombs,” he said, adding that it would have made more sense to clean up first before moving the local people.

Mr. Wei also cited the tight schedule for an undertaking of this size as another major problem. “We have only 10 months at most to do our job, because we can do nothing during the [summer] flood season, and it’s impossible to change the timetable set by the central government, whereby the reservoir is to be filled in 2003.” Mr. Wei said increasing the budget for the cleanup and forming a special team to carry out the arduous work could help accelerate the “urgent” operation.

Although the reservoir pollution problem was largely overlooked in the feasibility studies for the dam (see the November 1999 Three Gorges Probe article, Three Gorges dam to create huge, stagnant, stinking pond), critics of the project have for years been raising the alarm on this issue. For example, in The River Dragon Has Come! (edited by Dai Qing and published in 1998), contributor Jin Hui wrote of the mercury, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, phenol, lead, cyanide and other pollutants included in the millions of tonnes of wastewater spewed annually into the area of the future reservoir.

“The Three Gorges dam will exacerbate an already serious pollution problem in the Yangtze River,” wrote Mr. Jin, a journalist with the army newspaper, Liberation Army News (Jiefang junbao). “By severing the mighty river and slowing the flow of its water, the dam will cause pollution from industrial, residential, and township-level sources to concentrate in the river rather than be flushed out to sea. The result, for the 400 million Chinese who live in the Yangtze River Basin, will be a poisoned river.”

Meanwhile, the Chongqing Morning Post (Chongqing chenbao) revealed this week that Chongqing was ranked last in an official environmental-quality survey of China’s 46 large cities. The municipality, situated at the upstream end of the 600-kilometre reservoir that will form behind the dam, scored especially badly in terms of air and water quality, and garbage and wastewater disposal.

The newspaper said Chongqing did poorly in the survey despite efforts to improve its pollution problem in recent years, with the municipality spending US$800 million on environmental protection in 1996-2000. Vice-Mayor Huang Qifan was quoted as saying that budget will be increased to US$3.2 billion in 2001-2005, in the hope of raising Chongqing up from the bottom of the polluted-city list to somewhere near the middle.