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The World's Longest Tunnel
fusconed writes "Bloomberg reports that the Russian government is proposing to build an underground tunnel between Russia and Alaska for transporting goods, electricity and natural resources. The tunnel would be twice as long as that between the UK and France. The $10 — $12b cost is not something to be overlooked, but Russia claims the benefits would pay it off in 20 years. It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
According to Wikipedia, in 1990, when the Channel Tunnel was completed its cost was estimated as 10 billion GBP.
I'm no expert on inflation and exchange rates, but by estimating this tunnel at $10-$12 billion aren't they saying that a tunnel that is twice as long as the Channel Tunnel will actually cost less to build? Is there any reason to believe this will actually be so?
They have Boats for that sort of thing; it'd be a lot more practical.
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Come to cold, barren Alaska...it's not Siberia!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They've already moved 27 armies into Kamchatka and surrounding territories, but then they discovered that the world maps that they were working on weren't totally accurate. Now they find out that they need to create an actual line connecting to Alaska to enable their attack. It's pretty brazen of them to ask us for help.
No. Please don't.
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The whole idea is silly beyond words. WHY on Earth would you connect two nations, both of which have many viable ports, with a massive tunnel to their least populated and most distant parts?
The link between France and England makes sense. The tunnel spits people out very close to densely populated zones and provides access to the rest of Europe with a few hours (or less) of train rides. The link between Russia and the US would spit people and goods out as far as you can possibly get them from populated zones. The cultural benefits would be almost nil as it makes no sense to fly a few hours from the lower 48 states, land in Alaska, then take a train ride to the middle of nowhere Russia. You might as well just fly the whole way and go somewhere more interesting then frozen wastelands. If you want to ship goods to the US or Russia, you are better off just to load up a boat.
The whole idea is stupid.
...Alaska is Senator Ted Stevens home state...
I guess this brings a whole new meaning to "a series of tubes"!
Thanks,
Mike
Sweet - when I visit Alaska one day I'll be able to take the "Bridge to Nowhere" on my way to the "Tunnel to Siberia."
To answer you question, all that you need to do is to look at a map of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
9 /Pacific_Ring_of_Fire.png
Here's one, in case you had trouble finding one for yourself: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0
The Bering Strait is clearly well north of the Ring of Fire faultlines. Thus the tectonic impact will be minimal.
Furthermore, you don't throw together a $12 billion proposal and not take into account such things. Anything you can think of regarding this project has likely been thought of already by the planners. If crustal movement was to have a serious impact, we would not be hearing about this proposal, because it would have been scrapped long ago.
Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA?
... lots of stuff that's good to ship in bulk via pipelines or via heavy rail.
I don't think that you'd really want to bother with a road in the tunnel. Like the Chunnel, you'd probably use trains. They're more efficient, and you don't have to worry about exhaust gases building up in the tunnel (they're electric), plus they just make a lot more sense for moving bulk goods over long distances.
The Russians already have a well-developed rail infrastructure -- that's if they haven't torn it up for scrap metal lately -- and the Trans-Siberia Railway is all double-track and electrified (at no small expense, but hey, when you have a lot of peasants or comrades to employ, who cares?), so it would be dumb to transfer it all to trucks.
You can't run the same cars from Russia to the U.S., unfortunately they're like the only place in the world that doesn't use Standard Gauge tracks and rolling stock (they use 5-foot gauge instead of the standard 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches; oddly the latter actually works out more nicely in cm than the former), but if you did everything in shipping containers it wouldn't be that hard to build a yard somewhere and just shift them across to new cars. Probably do it on the Russian side since you'd want to save the space in the tunnels and go with the narrower gauge.
Russia, particularly Siberia, has a lot of natural resources. Timber, coal, mineral ores, and probably oil
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Whether this project makes sense aside, that's what we're blowing in one month in Iraq. Think about all the good infrastructure projects we could build with the money we're wasting on a civil war. Ok, stepping off the political soapbox. Next?
seriously, how awesome would it be to stick the family in the SUV in florida and wind up in beijing? or berlin?
"oh look a sign... next gas station, 1200 km"
"daddy i got to goes to the bathroom"
"not now honey, your pee will freeze to your dick or the polar bears might get you"
"mommy, jessica is drooling on me!"
"tell jessica we'll leave her at genghis khan's firecracker shack when we get to ulan bator if she doesn't knock it off"
"honey, all this mcdonald's drive thru serves is skinned uncooked dog"
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Yeah, but the English and the French hate each other, the Americans and the Russians.... Oh, wait, nevermind.