No, he said dam and he meant dam. I'll call it tidal power stations, though.
No they didn't, because that is too bullshit to believe. It also comes from the part of the book where Victoria turns into a best-of-every-possible-world utopia and I cannot even
slightly justify it as warped truth, so I'm writing it off as utter bullshit. They have Russian-owned nuclear power stations. They are not
cold fusion.
It is joined by nuclear plants, but yes, they do have
a thing in the Bay of Fundy, although it's a network of tidal power stations and not a single, monolithic, dam. Still generates a huge amount of power -- the tides are stupidly powerful, once somebody actually puts in the insane cost of harnessing them.
In this quest, the Fundy, "Dam," was a tidal power station initiative pitched by Rumford and sold to Kraft. It was insanely ambitious and realistically needed
way too fucking much time, but it went through and China was more than happy to gain immense economic leverage over the
East Coast as well as the West. Chinese corporations were selected to build the structures, and work began. Kraft and Rumford saw this as an innovative and sufficiently retroculture (HAH) way of solving their power issues, and also of stiffing China with a massive bill for the piddling return of, "influence," which of course can be cut off at any time for no consequences.
At this point, Alexander caught wind of his puppet -- to all appearances -- trying to trade him for another master. Now that I reread my own timeline, I recall that Kraft didn't stiff the Chinese the bill -- he simply went into the Cascadian crisis breezily certain that it would result in China's total collapse, allowing Russia to pick up the pieces. Because fate loved him back then, this actually happened. Alexander backed himself down from a coronary, vowed that this whole mess had given him one
more reason to murder everybody in the Northern Confederation's government once they were of no further use, and had his corporations pick up the pieces of the, "Dam," megaproject, since the Chinese had already shouldered so much of the cost that he
might as fucking well.
The, "Dam," in the modern day, is a group of tidal power stations built at immense expense by Chinese and Russian corporations -- most of that cost being assumed by the Chinese in the opening stages of what was (canonically, even) a decades-long construction initiative. It does provide an immense amount of power for Victoria, and also means that they have absolutely no way of ever escaping Russian control,
ever. The rest of their power is handled by the same Russian corporation that owns the dam, a grid of nuclear power plants repurposing old American installations and built on the proceeds of the killing they make with the Fundy Network.
One more way in which Victoria, ass-backwards as it is, turns a profit for Alexander.
GET THIS MAN A COMMISSION!
