What to Know and What to See
Kurobe Dam was built due to the shortage of electricity in the Kansai region
The construction plan of Kurobe Dam was born after the World War 2 when Japan's economy was midway to recover. The Kansai region, which is considered to have the second largest economic scale in Japan, was suffering from the serious shortage of the electricity at that time.
Decision of the electric company
People had no choice but obtaining the hydro power of Kurobe Gorge to meet the enormous demand for electricity in The Kansai region. KEPCO or The Kansai Electric Power CO., INC. found out the dam could cover the 80% of the demand in Kyoto prefecture and 20% that of Osaka prefecture and decided to build it.
How was Kurobe Dam constructed?
It took 7 years to complete the whole construction of the dam. There was a generally known saying "For every 10,000kW produced by the power generation facility, one person dies.", coming from the difficulty of the construction. However, actually it lost 171 lives in the line of duty to produce 250,000kW.
Scale of the power generation
The electricity transmission began in January 1961. Kurobe Dam is dedicated to the hydroelectric power generation and has a storage capacity of 200 million cubic meters (12 billion bl, equivalent to 160 Tokyo Domes). From the intake on the right bank of the dam, water is sent through a special tunnel dug into the mountains to the Kurobe River No. 4 Power Station, built underground about 10 kilometers downstream, and electricity is generated at a drop of 545.5 meters from the dam.
In Summer, you can see the spouting of 10 tons of water per second from a height of 186 meters.