Aswan High Dam 1968

[mmarotta]

Egypt commemorative 1 Pound crown.
Y126 - 1968 AD / AH 1387- 100k struck.
Cat '85 at $14.
24.6 grams 0.720 fine 0.5695 oz Ag.
40 mm

[mmarotta]

The Aswan High Dam is 3,830 metres long, 980 metres wide at the base, 40 metres wide at the crest and 111 metres tall. It contains 43 million cubic metres of material. At maximum, 11,000 cubic metres of water can pass through the dam every second. There are further emergency spillways for an extra 5000 cubic metres per second and the Toshka Canal links the reservoir to the Toshka Depression. The reservoir, named Lake Nasser, is 550 km long and 35 km at its widest with a surface area of 5,250 square kilometres. It holds 111 cubic kilometres of water.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam

The dam’s twelve generators each rated at 175 megawatts produce between 1.0 and 2.1 gigwatts every year. At first, delivering 50% to 60% of Egypt’s electrical power, the High Aswan now delivers as little as 8%, though about 15% to 20% are common estimates.  Over 80% of production today is via natural gas fired turbines.  Egypt recently announced plans for its first nuclear power plant. 
http://www.mbendi.com/indy/powr/af/eg/p0005.htm
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/08/egypt-government-turn-to-nuclear-energy-to-face-increasing-power-needs.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/aswan_high.html

Planning for the "High Dam" proper began in 1954, following the revolution.  Initially, both the USA and USSR were interested in the development of the dam.  The US and Britain offered to help finance construction of the high dam with a loan of US$270 million in return for Nasser's leadership in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nasser realised that he could not legitimately portray himself as the leader of pan-Arab nationalism if he could not defend the country militarily against Israel. Nasser looked to the Soviet Union for support.  In June 1956, the Soviets offered Nasser $1.12 billion at 2% interest for the construction of the dam. Funding began in 1958. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam

Unfortunately, the dam has also produced several negative side effects. In order to build the dam, 90,000 Egyptian peasants had to move. To make matters worse, the rich silt that normally fertilized the dry desert land during annual floods is now stuck at the bottom of Lake Nasser! Farmers have been forced to use about one million tons of artificial fertilizer as a substitute for natural nutrients that once fertilized the arid floodplain.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/aswan_high.html

Although the construction of the High Dam has been an unquestionably tremendous boon to Egyptian agriculture and has benefited industry by providing cheap electric power, it has also had far-reaching effects on the transport of fertile silt and sediments. These sediments are now trapped behind the dam, a situation which has led to severe erosion along the Egyptian coast. The dam also had great impact on the fertility of the coastal waters. The fertilizing effect of the inflow of the nutrient-rich water during the flood season once resulted in exceptionally dense blooms of phytoplankton off the Nile Delta. This "Nile bloom" provided sustenance to sardines and other pelagic fishes. It also constituted a large source of detrital material, the products of organic decay, which forms a vital source of food for commercially valuable organisms such as shrimp.

The decrease in fertility of the southeastern Mediterranean waters caused by the High Dam has had a catastrophic effect on marine fisheries. The average fish catch declined from nearly 35,000 tons in 1962 and 1963 to less than one-fourth of this catch in 1969. The shrimp fishery also took a heavy toll as the catch decreased from 8,300 tons in 1963 to 1,128 tons in 1969.

In recent years there has been a noticeable increase in the sardine catch along the Egyptian coast (8,590 tons in 1992) with most of the landings coinciding with the period of maximum discharge from the coastal lakes during winter. Since the late 1980s, the total fish catch (pelagic and bottom) off the Egyptian coast has grown to levels comparable to those that existed before construction of the dam. Whether this is due to increased fishing efforts or recovery of fish stocks is not clear.  http://ocean.tamu.edu/Quarterdeck/QD3.1/Elsayed/elsayed.html

[mmarotta]

Egypt 50 piasters commemorative crown
"Diversion of the Nile"
AD 1964 - AH 1384
Y-120 250k struck
20 gr - 0.720 fine - 0.463 oz Ag
'85 cat at $12.50
39 mm

"President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev have marked the first stage in the building of the Aswan High Dam. At a dramatic ceremony in southern Egypt, the two heads of state together, along with President Arif of Iraq and President Sallal of Yemen, pressed a button to blow up a huge sand barrage and divert the ancient River Nile into a canal, allowing the next stage of the Dam to begin."
(Full story from BCC "On This Day..." here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/14/newsid_2511000/2511423.stm.)

[BCNumismatics]

Mike,
  Those are very nice Egyptian silver coins that you have got there.

The 50 Piastres looks more attractive than the 1 Pound does.

You should get some photos uploaded to http://www.allnumis.com .

Aidan.

[mmarotta]

Thanks for the invite, Aidan, but the thing is that with some exceptions, I do not like cross-posting.  I believe that the value we bring here is in exclusivity. I mean if there is some Major Issue like import restrictions and you wrote a letter to the Times that got published, then, maybe ... 

I sort of resent it when people put their OmniCoin images here, as  waste of storage media, RAID or not. 

For another thing, redirects take people away from Coins Are Fun.  That dimishes the value of the Message Board, which aside from being impolite makes it hard if the Admin is trying to build a presence.  Maybe Admin has a different view of it, but those are my standards. Allowing for exceptions, I prefer to deliver unique content to this Board, as I do to the others I work in. 

[coinsarefun]

Thanks for the invite, Aidan, but the thing is that with some exceptions, I do not like cross-posting.  I believe that the value we bring here is in exclusivity. I mean if there is some Major Issue like import restrictions and you wrote a letter to the Times that got published, then, maybe ... 

I sort of resent it when people put their OmniCoin images here, as  waste of storage media, RAID or not. 

For another thing, redirects take people away from Coins Are Fun.  That dimishes the value of the Message Board, which aside from being impolite makes it hard if the Admin is trying to build a presence.  Maybe Admin has a different view of it, but those are my standards. Allowing for exceptions, I prefer to deliver unique content to this Board, as I do to the others I work in.

Well said mmarotta
Adian is well aware of excessive, unnecessary links here. He was dirrected to this post http://www.coinsarefun.com/forum/index.php?topic=287.0
But, Adian does have some great posts as well so we just need to give him a gentle reminder once in a while

[mmarotta]

Adian is well aware of excessive ...  Adian does have some great posts as well so ... 

This is becoming as politically charged as the Aswan Dam itself, and now the thread has been hijacked.  Perhaps this is best handled up top in Welcome or something, but no one poster is especially culpable of indiscretion.  More than a few have not given it any thought.  And that is my point: we don't think about it, like the Internet is one big entity.  We do not easily see property rights and the value in intellectual property.  Clearly, another Topic for a Discussion forum, but mysef, having thought this through many times to no conclusions since 1989, I give serious weight to intellectual property rights in cyberspace.  (See for instance my work here: http://www.elite-hackers.com/files/textfiles/fdp2.txt  I do not wish to argue it all, only to say that the problem is complicated.)

[mmarotta]

The 50 Piastres looks more attractive than the 1 Pound does.
Aidan.

Well, it is shinier!  More mint luster, perhaps only a better strike as the run was 250,000 whereas for the other it was a mere 100,000.  So, it is hard to say what their contractor was doing -- assuming that this was not a local product. That said, I believe that the 1 Pound has a better presentation, but I agree that the strike on the 50P is sharper with less evidence of "circulation" among collectors.

What I liked about the pair is that they celebrate a large scale engineering achievement.  The ecological and political downsides notwithstanding, this was tremendous.  I wish that rather than celebrating Wildnernesses, the current run of "American the Beautiful" quarters had commemorated similar examples of human efficacy, rather than godforsaken wildernesses.