Don't Mind Those Little Cracks

This is great. The Chinese government goes on the defensive about the Three Gorges Dam.

Since China built the Three Gorges Dam with high-grade concrete, it might extend the service life of the dam to five hundred years instead of the 300 years as engineers once expected, said Wang Dianchang, senior engineer at the State Council Three Gorges Dam Construction Committee, the Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao reported.

The service life of the dam depends largely on the materials that were used to build it. After completion, minor maintenance work might be done at some parts of the dam to make it more durable. However, this will not affect the general service life of the dam. Based on the current situation, we expect that the dam can be used for more than five hundred years, Wang said.

Only one little problem. That minor maintenance work is fixing structural cracks in the dam that appeared almost immediately after construction completion. No one in China has ever built anything with high-grade anything, and I'm not sure why the dam would be any different.