Quite easily, I imagine: Banqiao Dam needed to be built anyway in order to control downstream flooding and supply water. There was no option in which China just

Quite easily, I imagine: Banqiao Dam needed to be built anyway in order to control downstream flooding and supply water. There was no option in which China just didn't build it and saved huge numbers of lives. There was also no option of building a nuclear power plant instead even for the electricity generation side; commercial-scale nuclear power didn't exist at the time it was built, so you're inherently comparing over very different timescales. (Given the construction, engineering and operation standards of the dam in question, that's probably a good thing. Especially since if China did manage to set up a nuclear power plant close to that era it'd almost certainly have been an early RBMK design like Chernobyl.)