Discovery's Building the Future

Discovery Channel had a series, Building the Future, also touching on the South-North Water Diversion Project in China, and the Edogawa Project in Japan. More information here.

South-North Water Diversion Project (Beijing, China) (#1)

Beijing, with a population that has swelled to nearly 15 million people, is struggling with an increasingly dire water shortage worsened by 30 years of drought. The Chinese government's answer is the largest water diversion undertaking ever. First envisioned by Mao Zedong in the early 1950s but not begun until 2002, the project will transport 300 million gallons of water each day from the Yangtze River in southern China to the parched, populous north via three concrete rivers, each nearly 1,000 miles long. (The most difficult part of the project will be the western route, which will require construction on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, at 10,000 to 16,000 feet above sea level.) Plans call for the project to be completed by 2050 at a cost of $62 billion. But whether it will be enough to alleviate China's water woes is a difficult question. Experts say that even with the extra water, the Chinese capital will have to dramatically reduce average household water consumption just to keep up with population growth. Another problem: pollution from China's rapidly growing industrial sector threatens to make the diverted water unfit to drink.

Edogawa River Project (Tokyo, Japan) (#2)
With Tokyo in the path of as many as two dozen typhoons each year, the city and its 12 million inhabitants are continually endangered by flooding. The answer: one of the most massive pumping systems ever constructed. Begun in 1992, with completion scheduled for 2009, the $2 billion system includes a four-mile-long network of tunnels connected to an 83-foot-tall storage tank and a cathedral-like structure of 59 massive pillars. The system's powerful turbines can pump 200 tons of water into the Edogawa River each second. The system has become a Tokyo tourist attraction, and it also has been used by television and movie crews as an eerily dramatic backdrop.