China's Three Gorges Dam Is Its Own Special Kind of Dystopia: Photos

​98.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. ​This was the 2014 output of the looming mega-industrial fortress that is the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest power plant of any variety. It's a new world record. The previous record-holder was the Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu dam, which in 2013 produced a mere 98.6 billion kilowatt-hours. Not that it's a competition.

The Three Gorges mega-plant generates energy equivalent to around 50 million tons of coal every year, more power than the three largest hydropower operations in the United States combined. The costs are still being felt, however, as the dam project and ensuing reservoir displaced well over a million residents, many thousands of which are still essentially uncompensated refugees, victims of industry and local corruption.

The Three Gorges is what's known as a gravity dam. Its strength is the result of a sort of brute force in which the weight and heft of the dam itself is what keeps the water back. If one chunk of the dam were to break, the rest of the structure would be unaffected. This is in contrast to an ​arch dam, like Arizona's Glen Canyon dam, where the structure's strength comes from an upstream curvature. Pressure from the reservoir pushes in on this curve, which compresses and gains strength.

Plans for the dam date back ​nearly 100 years, to Sun Yat Sen, considered to be the father of modern China. The $180 billion project was only finally approved in 1992, but by the slimmest of margins. It remains a political open wound.

There are two sets of locks serving the Three Gorges Dam, raising vessels about 600 vertical feet over five lift stages as a kind of liquid staircase. Based on traffic estimates, shipping through the gorges or ex-gorges has increased six times over.

Dams are often given free passes as alternative or green energy, but they might also be considered just bizarre twists on industrialization. It's difficult to manage environmental harm when that entire environment has simply been obliterated and left to founder unseen under a new inland sea. Better than coal, but hardly free.