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Build NAWAPA, the "TVA of the 21st Century"

At the end of July, Lyndon LaRouche announced a mobilization to build the "TVA of the XXI century", the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), to create an economic recovery in the United States and worldwide. The NAWAPA project combines the two crucial factors of productivity for the advance of human economy: infrastructure and energy-flux density.

It comprises a system of dams and canals between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, which will transform the vastly wild regions of Midwest America. According to the original project by the Parson Engineering firm in Pasadena, California, in the 1960s, NAWAPA could assure adequate water supply to the continent for the next 100 years. The conserved water would be sufficient to irrigate 220.000 square km, equal to a 60 km wide strip extending 800 km into the Canadian agricultural belt, traversing the length of the United States, and extending 300 km into Mexico for a total length of 4000 km. By delivering 25 billion square meters of water to Mexico, the plan allows that country alone to develop eight times as much new irrigated land as the Aswan High Dam provides Egypt. In this original proposal, Canada would receive 25 billion square meters of usable fresh water, and the United States 96 25 billion square meters.

NAWAPA begins with construction of a series of dams in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, trapping the water of the various rivers running through this largely undeveloped wilderness area. The drainage area to be tapped is approximately 3.3 million square km, with a mean annual precipitation of 100 meters.

A large portion of the water thus collected would then be channeled into a man-modified reservoir 800 km long, 16 km wide, and 100 meters deep, constructed out of the southern end of the natural gorge known as the Rocky Mountain Trench in the Canadian province of British Columbia. This would be accomplished through a series of connecting tunnels, canals, lakes, dams, and, because the trench itself exists at an elevation of 1000 meters, even lifts. The network of projects provides plentiful opportunities for hydroelectric power development.

To the east, a 10 meters deep canal would be cut from the Trench to Lake Superior, to maintain a constant water level and clean out pollution in the entire Great Lakes system from Duluth to Buffalo.

South of the Rocky Mountain Trench, in central Idaho and southeastern Washington, a series of hydroelectric plants would develop the Clearwater and Clearwater North Fork Rivers and the lower reaches of the Salmon and Snake Rivers. Flow of the Columbia River would be supplemented as needed from other rivers as well as regulated at its direct connection to the Rocky Mountain Trench Reservoir to prevent flooding. NAWAPA aqueducts and reservoirs would dot the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, providing water to the Staked Plains and lower Rio Grande River basin and serving New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Mexico via existing rivers.

Flows from the Rocky Mountain Trench and Clearwater subsystem would also supply Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, California, and Arizona in the United States; and Baja California, Chihuahua, and Sonora in Mexico. A diversion aqueduct at Trout Creek, Utah would send high-quality, low- mineral water to southern California and Baja California. Here it would arrest soil damage caused by high-mineral Colorado River irrigation water.

Lyndon LaRouche's young collaborators in the “Basement Team” are working intensely on outreach to expert layers, and have produced the first-ever interactive, 3-D animated map of the infrastructure involved, which is available at http://larouchepac.com/nawapa. It marks out the sites for dams, reservoirs, power stations, pump lifts, tunnels and canals throughout the entire system, showing in detail how NAWAPA could completely transform the face of North America. In fact, it would thoroughly re-sculpt the physical terrain and hydrological cycles of the continent, transforming the popular conception of basic economic infrastructure, to its proper meaning as nothing less than the human species' management of the biosphere.

This huge project would immediately employ approximately 3 million people, including a very large portion of engineers, scientists, technicians, and machinists, whose skills represent the core capability for securing economic recovery for the country.

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