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Switzerland's Mega Tunnel Sets Record

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-a-bore dept.

Anonymous Dupaeur writes "Switzerland, co-home of CERN and numerous other world organizations, has come closer to the completion of their recent megaproject: the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which will be the largest railway tunnel made by man. The project is due to be completed in 2017, and will host 200 to 250 trains a day with a significantly larger kinetic energy than the LHC's beams." After the completion of today's work, the tunnel is now 57 kilometers long, surpassing Japan's 53.9-kilometer Seikan Tunnel. There are a few longer tunnels in existence, such as the 137-kilometer Delaware Aqueduct, but they all move water rather than people.

7 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Meanwhile in the U.S. by Lucas123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    A third of the nation's highways are in poor or mediocre shape. Massively leaking water and sewage systems are creating health hazards and contaminating rivers and streams. More than 6,000 of our nation's 115,000 bridges that are part of the national highway system are structurally deficient, and we can't even get a new tunnel built to link traffic from New York and New Jersey to Manhattan.

    1. Re:Meanwhile in the U.S. by TimHunter · · Score: 3, Informative

      Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

      New Jersey can't afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state's employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

  2. Re:Kinetic Energy? by atisss · · Score: 3, Informative

    2,808 bunches per beam, 1.15×10^11 protons per bunch

    and

    protons at an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (1.12 microjoules) per particle

    115000000000*2808 = 322920000000000 * 1/1000000 J = 322920000 Joules = 322 Megajoules, and 1 Megajoule is approximately the kinetic energy of a one-ton vehicle moving at 160 km/h. So it just takes 200 cars on highway to achieve kinetic energy of LHC

  3. Re:Kinetic Energy? by smolloy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Each particle has 5 TeV of kinetic energy.
    There will be (roughly) 1e12 particles per bunch, and (roughly) 1e3 bunches per pulse.

    This works out as ~800 MJ per pulse.

    That is the same energy as a 1e6 kg train moving at ~80 mph, so the comparison is not as daft as it would seem.

    (Note: Those numbers are all pretty rough, and I'm sure someone will be along soon to correct me soon, but the point is that the LHC beams store waaay more KE than you would imagine.)

  4. Re:Largest made by man by rossdee · · Score: 5, Informative

    We don't know what aliens have built on some other planet in some other solar system...

  5. Re:Tunnels vs. Highways? by chocolatetrumpet · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'll be honest, the 40 minute savings doesn't really seem to be worth 10 billion dollars, until you realize that the USA could have built 70 of these things instead of the Iraq war...

    --
    Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
  6. Re:Tunnels vs. Highways? by Sique · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's 40 minutes for 200 trains per day with 400-1000 passengers each. So it's at least 80,000 times 40 minutes per day saved, and if the tunnel gets used for 50 years, it saves 57.600.000.000 minutes or about 1 billion hours. Makes $10 per hour saved. Sounds sensible to me.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*