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Tunnel Boring Machine Completes Hole Under Niagara Falls
abhatt writes with news that "Big Becky," a 4,000-ton tunnel boring machine, has finished chewing through over 10 kilometers of rock underneath Niagara Falls, Ontario, a project that's been underway since 2006.
"The 10.2 kilometer tunnel is 14.4 meters in diameter. Big Becky ate through 1.6 million cubic meters of rock to reach her goal. That’s enough rock, officials said, to fill the Rogers Centre in Toronto. And the cement used to line the tunnel would build a sidewalk stretching from Windsor to Quebec City. ... The project took longer and cost more because Becky ran into unexpected conditions. She’s designed to go through solid rock, but encountered a stretch of loose, crumbling material that was unsuitable for tunneling. That forced a long and expensive detour."
There's no such thing as a "Rogers Centre." It's called SkyDome and will always be called SkyDome.
...it's boring.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What do you mean, why they built the tunnel. It's a tunnel. You've got to build tunnels.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Cement is an ingredient of concrete. It is not the finished product. Calling concrete "cement" is as stupid as calling clothing "cotton", or calling a sandwich "mayonnaise". Once you apply the mayonnaise to bread and add some lunchmeat, your creation has become a sandwich, and it is no longer simply mayonnaise.
Yeah, I get that fucking irritated by this.
AND SO SHOULD YOU.
I guess you believe you have concrete reasons to be annoyed but your rant has likely cemented opinions that you're over-sensitive.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Why they can use more water without affecting the laws governing the preservation of the fall's spectacle.
http://www.opg.com/power/hydro/new_projects/ntp/why_niagara.asp
What this proyect is all about!
http://www.opg.com/power/hydro/new_projects/ntp/tunnel_route.asp
The project was to up upgrade the existing hydroelectric generating stations that currently generate a little over 1.9 Gigawatts of electricity from the waters of the Niagara River. The Niagara River (on which you will find Niagara Falls) flows between the two Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It will add around 200 MW of power generating capacity. Thiswould have been a better news release article and explains a bit of the "green" projects in Ontario.
There: all you ever wanted to know about WTF the OP's linked article should have told you. FWIW, I agree that the OP's linked article is pretty lame. But that's nothing new for mainstream journalism. But I have to admit, Canadian news media that were once pretty damned good, are now pretty damned weak (Leaving out important contextual information, inability to spell, lack of grammar skills, just not understanding what the fuck they are reporting on and too lazy to find out).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
It's a feed tunnel for the Sir Adam Beck power plant below the falls. It's the third tunnel built for that purpose, and adds 194MW of generating capacity.
There's so much plumbing in place at Niagara Falls that the falls can almost be turned off. There's a minimum water flow over the falls established by international agreement, but that's for aesthetics. At night, and during the tourist off season, more water is run through the hydroelectric plants.
Back in the 1980s, some boater was upstream of the falls, closer than he should have been, and lost power. He managed to run aground upstream of the falls. This was noticed at the Niagara Mohawk power plant control room, where an operator opened all feed and diversion tunnels and closed gates at the upstream weir, shutting off most of the falls until a rescue crew could fetch the boater.