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!"

Has to be said

In Soviet Russia... tunnel digs you!

Re:Has to be said

No. Please don't.

Below the ICE sounds good but...

What about the crust movement? England and France are fairly stable compared to the "ring of fire".

Look at a map for your answer.

To answer you question, all that you need to do is to look at a map of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Here's one, in case you had trouble finding one for yourself: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09 /Pacific_Ring_of_Fire.png [wikimedia.org]

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.

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

Need i remind everyone about that nasty mars something mission? You know, the one in which a fairly stupid thing, like forgetting to convert to the metric system and back, caused the destruction of a very expensive project. You would think with all that money they would have thought about a silly thing like what the numbers represent as far as metric vs american goes. Anyways, thats the only expensive project i can almost recall off the top of my head, but my point is still valid:

Often, its the simplest/obvious details that come back to bite you in the ass, you know, the ones that someone should have thought of, that everyone ignored or passed off or simply dident think of, and all because it was so obvious that it wasent worth their time at the moment, someone else surely already thought of it, or simply passed off.

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

reminds me of that "100 things I will do if I become an evil overlord". High on the list was something like "I will hire an average 5 yr old as an advisor. Any flaws in my master plan that the child uncovers will be corrected before the plan is implemented." Humorous but insightful. (does that get me a +2?)

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

it reminds me of a similar project on the island of Samos in the 6th century BC. They dug an aqueduct through a mountain over a km long. They dug it from both ends, though from what I read of it, nobody knows for sure how they managed to synchronize their digging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eupalinian_aqueduct [wikipedia.org]

Why don't you try your scroll wheel and read the whole Wikipedia article. It explains exactly how they did it.

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

Actually, there is are earthquakes in Alaska. In fact, three of the the top 10 most powerful quakes in the world were located in Alaska. Just take a look here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/10_large st_world.php [usgs.gov]

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

Actually, Prince William Sound is almost 1000 miles from the Bearing Strait and even such a large earthquate would require sensitive seismographs to measure that far away.

The southern coast of the Aluetians are on the so-called "ring of fire" which is prone to earthquakes, whereas the Bearing Strait is quite far away. The analogy would be a building in Colorado scuttled by a large California earthquake. It is about the same distance from San Fransisco to Denver (930 miles, or so) as it is from PWS to the likely site of the tunnel.

Stew

Re:Look at a map for your answer.

Better yet:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a /Plates_tect2_en.svg [wikimedia.org]

The tunnel will be entirely within the north american plate. Someone below mentioned connecting vancouver island and the mainland. There's a reason why there isn't an existing physical connection between the island and the mainland, and neither money nor politics has anything to do with it. Vancouver Island, I believe, sits on the pacific plate, while as we all know, mainland is on the north american plate. Now that project would be quite infeasible, and dangerous to boot.

Better reasons for why no Vancouver Island tunnel

Take a look at this document from the government of British Columbia [gov.bc.ca]. It is a fairly extensive article discussing the various considerations for building fixed links (tunnels, bridges, etc.) across large bodies of water. In this case it talks specifically about a link between the British Columbia mainland (at Vancouver) and Vancouver Island, but the considerations it mentions are quite valid most places people want to create these kinds of links. A good read considering the OP.

A few points from the article on why a fixed link across the Straight of Georgia is not likely to happen any time soon:

In addition to the possibility of earthquakes, there are other engineering challenges to any fixed link across Georgia Strait. These include:

• length of a crossing could be up to 26 kilometres;
• water depths are up to 365 metres (1,197.5 feet);
• deep, soft sediments of up to 450 metres (1,476.4) on the ocean bed;
• potential marine slope instabilities along the eastern side of the Strait could result in future underwater landslides;
• extreme wave conditions (4to 7 metre waves, with 6 metre tides and 2 knot current);
• wind conditions (115 kilometres per hour on average with gusts to 180 kilometres per hour)
• passage of major ships through the area; and
• the need to protect a crossing structure against ship impact (a floating bridge could not withstand the impact of a tanker vessel).

I think someone who wrote that article did get the wind conditions wrong. I think it is fair to say that they can get wind speeds up to 115 kph or higher during a storm, as we saw this last winter. However, that is not an average wind speed, as I can attest to from trips I have made across the straight myself. :-) Wind speeds are no more different normally than say the English Channel.

For a tunnel, they would need to go down more than 815 metres (2,675 feet) to stay in stable rock (that is when it didn't shake from an earthquake or tremor). There is some speculation that if a major earthquake happened that huge underwater landslides from the sand banks on the south side of Vancouver (around where the south arm of the Frazer River exits into the straight) could cause a tsunami.

Re:Below the ICE sounds good but...

To answer your question - who gives a flying f*** about the crust movement. This is the last of your problems.

That tunnel will be the continuation of the "Road of Tears" on the Russian side. This is the Road from Magadan to Kolima and all the way to the Chukotka peninsula which was used to ship convicts to Gulag. If you want to see the state of this road get the documentary Ewan McGregor (of S*** Wars 1,2,3 fame) and his friend did on their BMW bike round the world trip (or the relevant magazine issues with pictures from there). It has been disused since the camps closed for 40+ years now. Most bridges have fallen into the rivers, the tarmac is gone and the road is just a jumble of concrete slabs slowly moved around by the permafrost thawing induced by them.

It will take twice as much money to fix that mess compared to the tunnel with minimal economical benefit. The potential goods flow is very low in the first place. You are shipping from one wilderness to another. How much can that be? In addition to that the total cost of goods shipping will end up being more than offloading them onto ships in Vladivostok and shipping across the Pacific. 6-7000 miles by train with very hight track maintenance expenses (I am not going to even mention trucks, it is silly) is way more than offloading the same goods on a big container ship and shipping across 3-4000 miles of sea.

Same for electricity - shipping electricity 4000+ miles is not cost effective. Gas and Oil probably may have some economical effect, but they do not need a tunnel. There is plenty of experience in running pipelines on the seabed by now. Including by Russians under the Black Sea.

Overall, the project is "hidrostroy" type madness. For the reference - hidrostroy was an organisation in the old USSR which built all the water dams and over the years it become a monstrousity of enormous proportions. It had the power to lobby for enormous insane projects which in turn allowed it to grow more and once again to lobby and so on. The last madness just before the fall was lobbying to divert the river flow of the major siberian rivers 2000 miles south to the Aral sea (which was destroyed by previous hidrostroy projects).

Re:A more current link

Yeah, but the English and the French hate each other, the Americans and the Russians.... Oh, wait, nevermind.

tastes like bacon

It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!

oink oink oink oink is that the smell of PORK? :)

But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.

And of the line losses. That's a thought. Which is greater- the line losses of electricity going from Russia to here, or the cost to ship coal from an equivalent power plant in Russia and in the United States?

Re:tastes like bacon

The article:

``It's cheaper to transport electricity east, and with our unique tidal resources, the potential is real,'' Zubakin said. Hydro OGK plans by 2020 to build the Tugurskaya and Pendzhinskaya tidal plants, each with capacity of as much as 10 gigawatts, in the Okhotsk Sea, close to Sakhalin Island.

So, this would be a means of transportation for the Russian tidal plant electricity, and you can't really ship tides. I haven't heard of any such large-scale tidal plants planned for North America, either.

Also, I believe the costs to build high-voltage lines or whatever is needed to get the electricity from the tunnel to a useful area would be dwarfed by the cost of the tunnel itself, which they've clearly already taken into account.

each b2 stealth costs 2 billion.

i think we could easily afford to finance this solo if we were to.. say.. pull back our armies, which are currently sucking up money occupying half the planet?

Cheaper Chunnel?

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], 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?

Re:Cheaper Chunnel?

Is there any reason to believe this will actually be so?

If you believe that ... I have a tunnel to sell you.

Interesting

Looks like it's only about 60 miles [google.com] with a nice little island halfway in between. It'll be interesting to see if this proposal goes anywhere. Any anticipated economic potential will have to be weighed against the operational costs, however, which will surely entail full-time security checkpoints at both ends and in the middle to thwart any bad guys looking to blow it up. Those costs can't be insignificant.

It's a plan to take over all of North America

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.

Risky Business

So in 15 years we can attack Kamchatka from Alaska with 3 dice?

Re:Risky Business

Only when you have four armies on Alaska. Remember you must move as many armies as dice that you throw, and at least one must stay on Alaska.

Re:Risky Business

An important move to make, so that no one else can get the 7 armies a turn bonus for holding the entire continent.

Never Going to Happen

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.

Re:Never Going to Happen

The tunnel wouldn't really be planned to transport many people. Currently, even using just the standard airplane/ferry options, very few passengers take the route that the tunnel is planned for. [1] [wikipedia.org] Presumably, the tunnel (or bridge) would be used primarily for transporting oil/gas/electricity (and possibly some containerized transport as well?).

Re:Never Going to Happen

I love the attitude common on Slashdot where posters come up with extremely obvious criticisms to new ideas posted on Slashdot, and then in an extremely conclusory manner dismiss the entire idea/project as stupid or silly. It's as if they assume that their intellect is so mighty, that surely whatever trivial criticisms they have to make have never been thought of by high ranking professionals whose job is to think about the project.

How much is it worth it to you?

It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"

What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.

Re:How much is it worth it to you?

It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"

What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.

Alaskans don't pay for anything, they have the rest of the country pick up the tab while they hold onto their Permanent Fund cash and elect people who decry excessive Federal government spending. Hypocrites of the first order.

Hmm....

...Alaska is Senator Ted Stevens home state...

I guess this brings a whole new meaning to "a series of tubes"!

Thanks,

Mike

Bridge to nowhere?

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."

Not underground, but undersea

The summary says underground tunnel, but it's actually an undersea tunnel and is likely above ground. These types of things typically are. The sections are dropped into the sea and connected together on the sea floor. They are not dug underground.

Re:Not underground, but undersea

The one under the English Channel is underground, and it's probably the most comparable to this one.

10-12 billion?

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?

passenger service

If this is built with a rail line, please run a passenger train now and then... perhaps once or twice a week, connecting to the Trans-Siberian. It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only. London and Singapore are connected by passenger rail, so why not Alaska, and then the rest of the US and Canada?

Rail connection to the Lower 48?

OK, so we get a tunnel to somewhere on the west coast of Alaska.... Then what? To the best of my recollection, there are no rail lines connecting Alaska with the Lower 48. So you're probably talking about a rail line paralleling the Alaska highway (built during WWII, when cost was no object...) to Prince Rupert, BC, and then probably to Edmonton, AB. So the people who would make out like bandits on this would be the Canadian railroads, all that bridge traffic to the United States.

If you're not familiar with the geography of Western Canada, it's worth taking a peek at your favorite mapping site... Make sure you look at something like Hybrid view on Google Maps, so you get a sense of the topography....

Unless there's already a rail connection from the proposed Alaskan terminal through Canada, I don't see this as being particularly economically feasible. Certainly the US should insist that Canada kick in a contribution.

But if this does come about, I hope they'll run passenger trains along that route, it would be a spectacular train ride!

        dave (occasional railfan)

p.s. Speaking of Canada, how about the prospects for a tunnel from the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island? My guess is that the island residents will never go for it, all that traffic would ruin their spectacular corner of the world...

road trip!

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"

Re:road trip!

can you spell 'councelling'?

Apparently, you can't spell 'counseling' either.

NYC Tunnel

NYC is on the East side of the Hudson River (except for Staten Island, but that's really Jersey). As is Long Island and New England. The Hudson runs all the way up to near Canada. So that hugely populous part of the country (over 30M people) is divided from the rest of the states. The closest railroad bridge to NYC is over 100 miles North of the City. We've got a couple of tunnels and a couple of bridges for trucks, though our ports have been reduced to a token amount of transfer.

So we've been trying to build the Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel [wikipedia.org] from Jersey City to Brooklyn. It's supposed to cost only $2-3B, which is only <5% the NYC annual budget.

But Mayor Bloomberg, like any NYC mayor, is more interested in real estate developers than in the overall economy of NYC, so he opposes it. But it's probably the best tunnel project being considered in the US. It would further integrate the US with itself, making us more productive, not further subsidize the Alaskan oil corporations and make us more dependent on the Russian mafia oil industry.

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA? Sounds like a good trick for the ruskies to get us to pay for most of it then threaten to take back Alaska. It's not like Putin is a nice soft fuzzy benevolent character or anything....

If the Russkies wanted to invade Alaska, what good would a tunnel do? Send through the ground troops? I'm sure that would work reeeeeealy well, especially after a few strategic collapses...

They have Boats for that sort of thing; it'd be a lot more practical.

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Ground troops, you say? Through a tunnel between Asia and North America?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061387/ [imdb.com]

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Reminds me of conversations I had with a mate in the navy:

"So, how's life on the boat?"

"It's a ship dammit - a SHIP!!" :-)

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Sounds like a good trick for the ruskies to get us to pay for most of it then threaten to take back Alaska. Wow, you said that and my Risk instincts told me to start building up troops in Alaska...

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Sounds like a good trick for the ruskies to get us to pay for most of it then threaten to take back Alaska. Wow, you said that and my Risk instincts told me to start building up troops in Alaska...

ha-ha! While you weren't looking I just took Greenland!

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

Last I heard, the coast was the only way and it didnt go ALL the way for roads. So Russia just gets to trade with Alaska, not the entire North American continent.

I can only assume you think other people are that stupid because you are that stupid. If you'd read TFA you'd have seen that they have in fact considered transport links on the North American continent. It doesn't mention roads, only rail, but trucks are a pretty crappy way to move stuff thousands of miles anyway.

I'm surprised they are considering a highway in the tunnel itself. Putting vehicles on trains is faster and safer and ventilating a 65km tunnel full of vehicles would be a huge task, even compared to the scale of the project.

Not truck traffic, but rail traffic, sure...

Will that enable truck traffic all the way to say, LA?

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 ... lots of stuff that's good to ship in bulk via pipelines or via heavy rail.

Variable-wheelbase railcars

I'm sure it's feasible to build a flexible railcar that can ride standard-gauge tracks, then upon exiting the tunnel westbound, expand its wheelbase to match the wider Russian tracks.

The tunnel would make for some enticing possibilities. Imagine a rail tanker full of Stolichnaya leaving Moscow and arriving in Boston two weeks later, totally free of stevedores' handling fees. Mmmm, vodka...

Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U

I've got to object to that. We British can easily build trains which can manage much more than 125mph.

The problem is we just can't get planning permission to build straight tracks. Locals object (because of noise), hippies object (to cutting down trees), environmentalists object (on principal) and so forth. By the time you incorporate the costs of fighting through all the planning, public enquiries, protestors, etc, building a high speed train link anywhere in the UK is un-economic.

Chunnel trains travel at high speed through France because they built a new, straight, track for them - when they get to the UK they have to slow to about 50% because they're running on old, curvy, tracks.

In the UK it's a real problem in all sorts of ways not just for trains. For example, everybody with half a brain knows that Heathrow Airport must have another runway. It's the only even nearly reasonable solution to current air traffic problems but the locals, hippies, enviros, etc, are fighting tooth and nail, it will take years to force it through despite the fact it's an absolute imperative and needs to be done yesterday.

Re:"goods, electricity and natural resources..."

Come to cold, barren Alaska...it's not Siberia!

Re:Why not a bridge?

Well, since you're already on Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_bridge [wikipedia.org]

Re:Madness

To conect the middle of nowhere to a place with absolutely nothing

That is only true if USA does not buy anything at all from China and Korea and Japan. But it does.

As many posters indicated, this tunnel can guarantee transportation of goods using tidal energy, in other words - even when fuel oil for ships is in short supply or becomes just too expensive. Most of the railways in the Far East already have electric power, and the new tracks for the tunnel will definitely have electric power as well. This would allow you to transport anything directly from China through Transsib [wikipedia.org] and the connecting railways to Alaska, bypassing the ocean and the shipping completely.

In other words, the Peak Oil concept may be believed or disbelieved by populace, and nobody cares what you or I think about it. However large states must pay attention to the possibility, even if it is only a conjecture. The tunnel between continents would greatly add to national security of both USA and Russia - in the real sense of national security, such as the guaranteed ability to trade for centuries ahead.