Something I never expected, worth sharing. I wonder if they’ll have an exit for Yamal?
From Slashdot, news that leads me to think that someday I’ll be able to put my car on the train in Alaska and drive it off in Russia like they do with the Eurotunnel.
In what could easily be one of the boldest infrastructure developments ever announced, the Russian Government has given the go-ahead to build a transcontinental railway linking Siberia with North America.
The massive undertaking would traverse the Bering Strait with the world’s longest tunnel – a project twice the length of the Chunnel between England and France. The project aims to feed North America with raw goods from the Siberian interior and beyond, but it could also provide a key link to developing a robust renewable energy transmission corridor that feeds wind and tidal power across vast distances while linking a railway network across 3/4 of the Northern Hemisphere.
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Who would have thunk that Palin would be so prescient?
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Proposed tidal energy plants could provide 10 gigawatts of energy and a string of wind power fields could churn a constant supply of clean energy,
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CONSTANT ?
CLEAN ?
Perpetual motion machine coming right on up …
right after we start making any engineering project ‘clean’
Most important lesson to try & teach to all your non-science friends (who don’t ‘do’ maths or any applied subject eg politicians and environmental types; especially socialists) is HOW THINGS ARE MADE.
Next most important lesson is HOW THINGS ARE INTER DEPENDANT.
Of course you may struggle a bit with teaching them basic logic first
Look at that leg from Yakutsk to the Eastern tip of Chukotka (Uelen)! That’s 3500 km through the most difficult mountainous terrain in Subarctic conditions, with world’s record low temperatures in winter and summer skies darkened by the clouds of mosquitoes, where there is no infrastructure of any kind. The leg from Tynda to Yakutsk is another 1000 km of the most difficult terrain.
Russia is barely upholding its budget by selling all the oil, gas, aluminum, precious metals and any other natural resource they possibly can, while everybody who knows how to do anything is running from this degenerated country drinking itself into eternal stupor in mortal agony from self-inflicted wounds, seething with triumphant criminals like a dead horse with writhing grubs.
Most Russian senior citizens and country folk live in what millions of obese, digital TV-watching American food stamp recipients would call “an abject poverty”. Professional murderers and thieves are ruling Russia as their feudal estate, pumping abroad billions of dollars of stolen money every month, competing in vulgar luxury in Nice and London.
The projected cost of the tunnel alone is 65 billion dollars. Knowing Russian pervasive corruption and brutal weather in Eastern Siberia, I would multiply this number at least by 20. Building the railroad from the existing, poorly maintained single-track Baikal-Amur line to Uelen would cost at least as much.
Who would finance all of this? Who would build it? In today’s Russia, this project is nothing but grand posturing, a pipe dream that will never realize. Not to mention that the last thing Kremlin wants is any kind of an easy direct route to America. If they could, they would close the borders with Europe again.
Nothing shall come out of this but empty talk, at least for 20 years from now.
Alan the Brit
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OT – BBC Radio 2 breakfast show news this morning, “scientists” reckon that there are some 90%+ species yet to be discovered on the planet??????????
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actually he made some sense; and he didn’t try and wrap in doom & gloom or CAGW. the innumerate presenter did state 8.74 +/- 1.3 Million (IIRC) for which the scientist picked him up (wow; that impressed me; some one dared point out how stupid they were; but the comment obviously went way way over the Beeb’s head). It was also pointed out this was one of many estimates and on the low side; but the scientist did almost succeed in turning it into a proper science report !! No doubt it will not get many repeats once the Beeb droids work out what plonkers they were made to look.
Reminds me a bit of the old joke:-
A man caught himself a leprechaun, who informed him that he was a special leprechaun that could only grant one wish.
After thinking, the man said that he was afraid of flying, but had always wanted to visit Hawaii. Therefore his one wish was for a highway from California to the Big Island.
“you have to be joking” said the leprechaun. “Do you realise how hard that would be! Great depths, big waves – all sorts of problems. Choose something else!”
After a bit of contemplation, the man said “OK, in that case I would like to understand women.”
In a trice, the leprechaun replied “Two lanes or four?”
Just one thought…”Ring of Fire”. How geologically stable is the sea-bed in the Bearing Straits?
Wucash says:
August 24, 2011 at 1:37 am
Drive from England to South America should be one hell of a roadtrip
Or how about Cape Town to Cape Horn? A few ‘interesting’ places to travel through…
P.S. Exit for Yamal? That would be another 5000 km through the most forbidding terrain.
Please don’t forget that Siberia alone is larger than the USA and Canada combined.
You can build a dual-gauge system using three rather than two rails. Two of the rails are placed adjacent to each other on one side to provide the correct width for either train. This is already used in Australia to link the New South Wales (standard gauge) and Queensland (narrow gauge) freight lines to Brisbane.
Dual gauge rail lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_gauge
The boys on the BBC show Top Gear would certainly be up to the challenge. Traveling by care from say South Africa to the Chile would be one hell of an odyssey.
Willis says:
“The other reason is trans-shipment. Every time you go from rail to ship or back again it costs money. Not as much in this containerized age, but still every container has to be picked up one by one from the train, and moved to some position on the ship, and set down, and locked down … then the process has to be reversed at the other end.
As such direct rail from Moscow or Siberia to New York seems a big step up.
Regarding Vladivostok I find that there are container ships going to other smaller Russian ports, and to South Korea, China, Vietnam, and Japan. Nothing to the US, though, you’d need to trans-ship again likely in Japan. Another argument for direct rail.”
A check of import flows from Russia to Japan suggests that oil is by far the most important product exported by Russia to Japan and that most of the this product shipped to Japan is crude oil. The volume of shipment from Russia to Japan and the lack of such shipment from the Russian Far East to the US suggests that the purpose of this tunnel may be to reduce shipping costs of oil from Russia to the US.
I’m not saying a tunnel across the Bering Strait will never happen, but I doubt it is happening any time soon. Sometime many decades from now, there might be seasonal ferries carting goods across the strait. If that happens, and it might, and if the seasonality becomes a problem because of the volume of trade, THEN might be the time to talk about a tunnel. Lots of infrastructure needed before any of that can happen — e.g. right now, the only ways to get stuff from Fairbanks/Anchorage to Nome would be by air, by ship, or by dog sled.
Coal? Going which way? The US is an energy importer, but the only thing that keeps our energy situation from being dire rather than serious is that the US has huge coal deposits — largest reserves in the world. What country is second? Russia.
Maybe we could start by allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built connecting the USA to Canada first……
coldlynx notes that speed may be the issue here and that if direct rail service were available between Russia and North America, then raw materials, especially crude oil, could be transported with greater speed from Russia to North America. My question is, does it matter if crude oil can be shipped more quickly by rail than by ship?
Arizona CJ makes very strong skeptical points, particularly that thousands of miles of rail would need to be constructed both in Russia and in North America before the construction of such a massive tunnel could be contemplated. Is the potential value of petroleum shipments great enough to justify such an expense?
Instead of worrying about the gauge-switching, which is a very old problem that has been solved in many different ways, maybe you should be worrying more about the simple geographical implications.
This will make Canada a major player in world trade, and will turn the oil and mineral industries of Alberta and BC toward Russia instead of southward. Why face infinite EPA obstacles and idiot protesters to the south when you can ship west to a rich and rational country instead? (And you can be dead sure the infinite EPA obstacles will continue; no pro-science or pro-American candidate will ever be appointed as President.)
On the other hand, you could just tunnel through the centre of the Earth. Can’t see any problem with that 🙂
The article says, “The project aims to feed North America with raw goods from the Siberian interior and beyond”.
Hmmmmmm…. Nope.
Sorry to be a downer here, but the fact is, we (the USA) are kind of fiscally broken at the moment. We have HUGE amounts of Treasury Bonds that we owe principle and interest on. When individuals are broke and have big bills, they sell the furniture and Momma’s necklace. When nations are broke, they sell off lumber, minerals and petroleum from national lands. If this tunnel is ever actually built, the flow of raw materials will NOT be from Siberia to the USA — it will be going the other direction.
Ryan Maue says:
August 24, 2011 at 12:10 am
> …distract from the fact that the trains will haul coal — lots of coal. And, the more coal.
Oh dear. James Hansen will hold protests to stop the Siberian Death Trains.
Alternate thought 1) Is this a good idea so close to tectonic plate boundary? And volcanoes. It would be a bummer if a volcano filled the tunnel with lava (and innundated coal train) in the first year of operation.
Alternate thought 2) Okay, there used to be a Bering land bridge which allowed some Native Americans to immigrate here (for PC definitions of “Native”). How tall would the pylons have to be to create a bridge over the same path, and how long would it last before storms force its abandonment?
This is obviously a pipe dream if not a hoax. I’m surprised Anthony Watts bothered with this. American greenies would never allow the railroad link across Alaska and Canada. It’s not possible to build large infrastructure projects in the US any more thanks to the green movement.
Some years ago, science fiction writer Harry Harrison published an alternate history story titled ‘A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!’ I expect Captain Augustine Washington and his crew of navvies would certainly find a Transbering Tunnel a lesser and more practicable challenge. Of course, there would be an environmental impact study to worry about.
As this appears to be only twice as long as the ‘Chunnel,’ this probably will be done someday and it will include a link going down the West Coast, as it does not make much sense to go from Moscow to Seattle via New York.
I wonder if anyone has checked the frequency of earthquakes and volcanic activity along the planned route? And good luck getting this past the EPA, Greenpeace, et al on the Alaska side.
The only people on the planet today with the technology and skill to do something like this are the Iranians. So you can pretty much bet your last worthless googleplex denominated greenback that it just ain’t gonna’ happen. Anyway, who needs another Chunnel? It’s back to the old Horse and Buggy, not forward to the Stars. Well, it is if you’re wealthy enough to have a horse and buggy. Most of us in the US are going to be forced to rent a Mexican buro or two to pull our old Hondas down the road pretty soon, that is, if we have any copper pipes left in our house to cut out and pay The Man with. It’s a mad mad world, and the worst of the lot –for some wierd reason– seem to still think they’re the Universe’s Gift to planet Earth and the Lord High Protector of All they survey. I still think it’s something in the water. Or some genetic modification to coffee or tea.
PS: SarcOff
Sounds like the old Manifest Destiny argument to me…
It has been mentioned above already, but seriously, think about the soundness of importing “resources” to Canada and the US for a minute. It’s akin to Australia spending billions to import Kangaroos! Mind you, I would not be surprised to find out that Gillard is already proposing to do just that. But an Alaska/Chukotka tunnel would be better than kite surfing.