A foul flow?
Environmental concerns have dogged the project every step of the way, starting with pollution. Some $1.75 billion is being spent on measures to clean up the Huaihe River, a feeder for the eastern route and one of the most polluted rivers in China. The Hanjiang River is also a major headache. “The middle and lower parts of the Hanjiang have already been seriously polluted by industrial wastes,” says Du Yun, a hydrologist at CAS’s Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in Wuhan. Four major algal blooms on the river since the early 1990s have triggered mass fish kills. The central route would draw off approximately 16% of Hanjiang’s flow, concentrating pollutants and prompting Du to anticipate “big impacts on the environment and water ecology.”