Slashdot Mirror
China May Build an Undersea Train To America
New submitter howtokilltime sends this news from the Washington Post: "China is planning to build a train line that would, in theory, connect Beijing to the United States. According to a report in the Beijing Times, citing an expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Chinese officials are considering a route that would start in the country's northeast, thread through eastern Siberia and cross the Bering Strait via a 125-mile long underwater tunnel into Alaska."
About the same as with a shorter underwater tunnel, such as this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Not America proper. You had us worried for a minute there, guys.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
This project, a bridge tunnel between Alaska and either Russia or China, has been discussed for decades. It would be an awesome idea and a massive undertaking. To date, no one has actually done it because of the easy access to air travel, cheap ocean freight, and the expense of building a 100+ mile bridge in some of the harshest environment known to man.
The days of terrorists? Are you kidding me? Terrorism has always existed. The only way to combat it is to not let it scare or deter us from going about our lives.
The United States already lost a war against terrorism by instituting ridiculous laws, spying and harassment because the government was scared. That is exactly the goal of terrorism.
They've got the money and the manpower. Nationalism is the only resource that lack of may stop them. Projects such as these and their moon base plans are money well spent.
Terrorists use plate tectonics now ?
Both sides of the Bering strait are part of the north american plate.
Are they building this tunnel to move cargo less efficiently than a cargo ship or to move people less efficiently than an airliner?
It seems like building the railroad to the Bering Strait, and then using a ferry to cross would be the more practical approach.
Shipping by sea is cheaper than rail. I you are going to put it on a ferry, then you might as well just put it on a container ship in Shanghai or Tianjin, and ship it by sea to Seattle or Long Beach. Which is exactly what we do now. There is no way that an eight thousand mile railroad, through some of the world's most rugged terrain and harshest weather, can compete with container ships, even without the cost of building the tunnel.
Please, extremely long tunnels already exist such as the one between Hokkaido and Honshu.
The concept of an overland connection crossing the Bering Strait goes back before the 20th century. William Gilpin, first governor of the Colorado Territory, envisioned a vast ''Cosmopolitan Railway'' in 1890 linking the entire world via a series of railways. Two years later, Joseph Strauss, who went on to design over 400 bridges, including the Golden Gate Bridge, put forward the first proposal for a Bering Strait railroad bridge in his senior thesis. The project was presented to the government of the Russian Empire, but it was rejected.
A syndicate of American railroad magnates proposed in 1904 (via a French spokesman) a Siberian-Alaskan railroad from Cape Prince Wales in Alaska through a tunnel under the Bering Strait and across northeastern Siberia to Irkutsk via Cape Deshnev, Verkhnekolymsk and Yakutsk. The proposal was for a 90-year lease, and exclusive mineral rights for 8 miles (13 km) each side of the right-of-way. It was debated by officials and finally turned down on March 20, 1907.
-----
Aside from the obvious technical challenges of building two 40-kilometre (25 mi) bridges or a more than 80-kilometre (50 mi) tunnel across the strait, another major challenge is that, as of 2011, there is nothing on either side of the Bering Strait to connect the bridge to.
The Russian side, in particular, is severely lacking in infrastructure, without any highways for almost 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) (the nearest is M56) and no railroads or paved highways for over 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) in any direction from the strait.
On the American side, at least 800 kilometres (500 mi) of highways or railways would have to be constructed in order to connect to the American transport network
Bering Strait crossing
Personally traveling to and through Boston is a 100x better than it used to be because of the Big Dig. Not to mention it reconnected two parts of the city that the original above ground highway effectively severed from each other, allowing for an insane amount of development in the seaport area since (http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/07/rise-seaport-district-boston/). The entire area has been transformed.
Train freight is far cheaper than shipping.
No, water is always the cheapest way to ship things long distance. In fact it's not unusual for container ships from China to use NY harbor (just take a look from the Narrows) in spite of the much longer distance than shipping to the West Coast and then shipping cross-country by rail.
The problem is the proverbial "slow boat to China" (or from China these days). A trans-Pacific cargo ship generally takes around 3 weeks. You could steam faster, but the fuel consumption would rise dramatically.
>My question is what purpose it would solve. By the time the route is finished, there won't be any way for the US to import anything from China. Food exports from USA to China, perhaps, as an attempt to pay the interest on what is owed?
Your post displays a lack of knowledge of how the trade deficit works.
In a nutshell, we don't borrow money from China. We buy goods and services from China, and we use US Dollars for the transaction.
China can then spend those US dollars in the American economy - perhaps to buy American goods in exchange - but they choose instead to put those greenbacks into US treasuries, which is the single safest investment in the world. Other countries would sell those greenbacks on the currency markets to obtain their native currencies, causing currency prices to fluctuate accordingly, but China has decided to keep their exchange rates at artificial levels that advantage them and disadvantage the rest of the world, especially the United States. But I digress.
The US treasuries that China owns can't be all called in at once. They can be sold on the open market, which technically could cause US treasury rates to rise, making borrowing more expensive for the United States, but in all likelihood they would not impact those rates by very much. The important thing here is that China can't roll up to the US Treasury with a briefcase (well, okay - trucks) full of bonds that haven't matured yet and expect to cash in. It doesn't work that way. While the US does pay interest on those treasuries, the interest rates are quite low right now.
There's a lot more to this - but suffice to say, macroeconomics is not microeconomics - things you need to take care of at a household level often don't mesh with what governments have to do in order to keep the books balanced. It's a common misconception that the US national debt is necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, I didn't know that Alaska was bought from the Russians. I see on wiki that it was bought for $7.2 million. Which is $119 million in 2014. Which makes Alaska worth about 1/25th the value of Beats by Dr Dre.
Funny old world.
Come on now, it's not that remote. Putin said he could see Alaska from his house.
If you need a long tunnel, you just join two short ones together with duct tape. If you need a longer one, use three, and so on. Hence the mathematical term, proof by induction.
Kids today, with all their fancy-pants book-learnin'. If we'd listened to all the people who'd said it couldn't be done there's be no fusion power stations or cities on the moon.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."