VietNamNet Bridge – The lack of the national standards on hydropower plants has led to the development of unsafe hydropower plants. Scientists have said 80-90 percent of small and medium dams need to be verified in their safety.

Professor Vu Trong Hong, Chair of the Water Resources Association, believes that the set procedures for hydropower plant construction are “problematic.”

The biggest problem of the hydropower plants in Vietnam is that the hydropower plant programming does not comply with the river basin planning. As a result, the dams of the hydropower plants do not allow stopping floods in rainy season, while they cause the water shortage to the lowland area in the dry season, because they have to store water for power generation.

Tran Thi Hue, MA, from the Water Resources Management agency, an arm of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, said being the watchdog agency in the field, but the agency regularly is not informed about the hydropower projects.

When the Ministry of Industry and Trade draws up the plan on developing hydropower plants, the water resource management agency is not consulted with. This shows the ineffective cooperation among relevant ministries and branches.

Also according to Hue, in many cases, the investors only asked for the permission from the agency after they kicked off the construction of the plants already.

“This always puts us on the defensive,” Hue said, adding that in the cases, the agency could not decide how to deal with the projects.

The biggest problem now for hydropower plant projects in Vietnam is that Vietnam still does not have national standards on hydropower plant development, while ministries have set up their own requirements.

In fact, there always exists the council which checks the construction works before acceptance. However, the council is always hired by the investors, not independent organizations. Therefore, scientists say, the conclusions made by the council are not reliable.

Under the current laws, hydropower plant developers must submit the reports on possible environmental impacts to watchdog agencies before implementing the projects.

However, in many cases, the reports did not have much significance, because they were just made for form’s sake.

In regards to the Song Tranh 2 hydropower plant, which is now a hot topic at the ongoing National Assembly’s session, according to Prof Hong, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment admitted that there was no criteria to measure the stimulus earthquakes.

Vietnam still has not set up the procedures on regulating water reservoirs in chain. Therefore, in the rainy season, when dams all let water out, this may lead to the heavy floods, threatening the dams’ lives.

Also according to Prof Hong, by the nature, small and medium hydropower plants are less safe than big hydropower plants. Meanwhile, most of the small scaled projects have been developed by private investors, who try to cut down expenses by using cheap Chinese equipment and skip some procedures during the project execution process.

As a result, a lot of hydropower plants got broken down just after 10-20 years of operation, while existing ones do not have water to run.

In related news, there has been no official decision on whether to allow the investors to develop the Dong Nai 6 and Dong Nai 6A hydropower plant projects, while debate about the safety of the plants remains very hot. The projects, which were put on the table of the watchdog agencies for the last 10 years, have not got the “go ahead” so far.

CAND