China's Terrifying $167 Billion Mega-Dam Project

Somewhere in the deepest canyon on Earth, there is a place so remote it did not even have a road until recently. Now, China is building something that has never been tried before. There is no wall of concrete here. There is no lake rising up behind a dam. Instead, engineers plan to punch huge tunnels straight through a mountain. A river will drop farther than the height of hundreds of stacked buildings. Then it will crash into turbines and roar back out miles away from where it went in. When this project is done, it should make about three times more electricity than the biggest hydro power plant on the planet today. The price tag is already being called one of the largest ever put on a single piece of infrastructure. It comes close to 167 billion US. That is more money than many entire countries make in a year. But this story is not just about size. It is also about a river that does not stop at any border. Countries downstream are already asking hard questions that nobody has fully answered yet. How do you tunnel through a mountain instead of blocking a river? What happens when you build something this big in a place where the ground shakes hard and often?