http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/04/24/russia.alaska.tunnel.ap/index.html
Well… not just yet. Someday, maybe? Or is this forever doomed as a pipedream?
I’d love to see that happen. What an awesome engineering marvel that’d be!
One can only hope. There is nothing to connect to on either end. You would have to build hundreds of miles of highway or rails to connect it to the road system in Alaska, and the same in Siberia. This is not only a tunnel to nowhere, it is a tunnel from nowhere.
Here’s the thing. What exactly does this accomplish? It is probably technically feasable. But how much money will it cost? A bazillion dollars. And what do we get for our money? A bridge/tunnel/whatever that goes from nowhere to nowhere. There is currently no rail link to Alaska. That’s right, as of today there is no economic incentive to construct a train track, technology that has been perfected for over 100 years, between the lower 48, through Canada, to Alaska. There’s an Alaska railroad, but it connects Fairbanks and Anchorage and doesn’t connect to the lower 48 network. And while you can drive to Fairbanks, you can’t drive to Nome.
So any such proposal would have to include the costs of a rail link from Nome to, say, Seattle, and a road link from Fairbanks to Nome. Then the bridge/tunnel crossing to Siberia. And THEN you’ve got to construct a rail/road link to, I suppose, Vladivostok, which would connect you to the trans-Siberian railroad, and (I assume) to China.
And this accomplishes…what? Now you can drive from Florida to Vladivostok? Nobody is going to do that. If you want to get to Vladivostok, why don’t you fly? No one except for a few crazy adventurers would do such a thing. OK, you could ship goods by rail between Asia and N. America. Except…what’s the advantage to shipping by rail compared to shipping by, well, ship? Shipping is cheaper than rail.
So if you need to travel between Asia and NA, you travel by air for speed and convenience, by ship for low cost and volume. Even if a road/rail link was built for us for free by benevolent elves, it would be barely used, and the cost simply to maintain it would be astronomical and the traffic couldn’t justify the maintainence costs, let alone the construction costs.
Wouldn’t continental drift eventually crush it in the middle?
But I have no idea how fast that works.
Why would this be useful? I don’t think there is much demand for road traffic across the Bering Straight. The distances are too great for anything but High Speed Train for this to ever make any sense.
So the Tunnel is projected at $65 billion, I expect it will cost far more. How much would the other rail lines cost to each end of the Strunnel[sup]TM[/sup]? Long Rails across the US through well populated areas quite often struggle to make money.
Who is clamoring for these trips? Will it save freight costs over shipping across the Pacific? Can the Russians build the rail system? What would the US & Canada gain from its existence?
The Chunnel made perfect sense. The Bridge & Tunnels links from Denmark to Sweden made perfect sense. This would be an unbelievable project between two virtually uninhabited locations. I do not see the value.
Jim
Express, they say? Currently London-Vladivostok hits the 200-hour mark (from here). Even if and when oil supplies make air travel uneconomic, I can see travel across the Pacific by ship being a more viable option than this.
If the attendees of the conference in which this project was discussed have $65 billion laying around and they – for whatever reason – can’t think of anything better to spend the money on, then they can certainly spend their money as they see fit.
But they should really leave us taxpayers out of it.
Things speed up a lot after you get past the Berring Strait though. Assuming we had a high speed rail next to the Berring Strait, though Alaska, into Canada, down to the West Coast, and then across a dozen states or so, you could probably make it to New York or Washnigton in less than 100 hours from Alaska.
That is 300 hours (less than 2 weeks) on a train. It took sailing ships significantly longer to bring the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock for instance. The only way to beat that would be to invent some type of craft that would just rise away and ignore the land and water completely and move directly from point to point.
And think about this. We don’t even have a workable road and rail link to South America. Why is that? Because anyone who wants to go to South America flies there, and anyone who wants to ship goods between NA and SA does so by ship. It’s much cheaper.
The barrier to a road/rail link between NA and Asia isn’t the Bering Sea. That could be overcome. Rather it is distance. The chunnel connects two densely populated countries with dense rail and road networks already in existance. A Bering Straight connection connects nothing.
I’ve long had a dream of driving from the US across the Bering Strait, and from there through Eurasia and into Europe. (I’ve literally dreamt this several times.)
I agree with most of what’s being said here, but I do think this thing would pay for itself. Once American lumber and mining companies get a tiny foothold into the Siberian region, the entire world will undergo a fundamental change. Economically, socially, technologically, you name it - Corporate America’s conquest of Siberia will be the event that unites the world under a capitalist system.
Think about it - the most area of the greatest natural unexpoited resources, which the Russians have never had the ability to leverage, suddenly laid open to US style development. The environmental impact will of course be terrible, but the payoff is stunning - Russia becomes an economic powerhouse rivalling Japan, remote regions like Mongolia and Uzbekistan will suddenly become close neighbors. Proximity breeds trade, and wealth breeds more trade yet. And it spreads from there to Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, China… the peace that can’t be won on the field of war will instead be bought. A grand vision indeed. The tunnel could facilitate this.
Sound like a perfect project for Ted Stevens. Not only does it spend enormous sums of money on something totally crazy, tunnels are right up his alley. Because, you know, tunnels are just a series of tubes.
They can’t even make up their mind if they’re going to build the tunnel between Europe and Africa.
That strikes me as a more practical idea, and they can’t get it done, so I can’t see an Alaska to Russia tunnel being built. Mind you, if they do, I’ll drive it at least once, just for shits and giggles.
Except development of Siberia isn’t likely to be much more profitable than development in Alaska and the Canadian north. Sure, there’s gold, lumber, oil, fisheries and so forth. But that hasn’t resulted in massive development in northern Canada or Alaska. Sure, there’s the Alaska oil pipeline, that provides some jobs, but Alaska is still a net beneficiary of federal tax money. It’s not an economic powerhouse. And the native villages that aren’t connected by road are still as poor as ever.
A couple of giant gold mines or oil pipelines aren’t going to transform Siberia. Siberia has had this kind of exploitation since the days of the Czars.
The rail line out to Baikal was enough of an ecological disaster for Siberia. I honestly hope this never, ever happens.
Why can’t it be corporate Russia’s conquest of Siberia?
How so?
You’re working under the presumption that they are unable to do those things today. But the other posters here think that these things can be done today, easily and cheaply, by boat. I suggest that you illustrate why you disagree with them.
If the Russian Far East has a natural market, it’s China rather than North America. Road and rail links to the south make a lot more sense than a single rail link that connects to Alaska and Canada, which resource wise are similar to Siberia.
Look, what advantages would working on resource extraction in Russia have over working in Canada or Alaska? If the answer is the corrupt Russian government will look the other way to ecological devastation, that’s not going to lead to the westernization of Russia. This is the economic model that Russia has applied since the time of the Czars and through the communist era. Resource extraction to benefit the political elites, on the backs of an oppressed and powerless local population, carried out by slaves and prisoners at gunpoint, regardless of consequences. And it that’s the economic model for the Russian Far East, how does that lead to the triumph of capitalism? It’s rather the opposite.
Errmmm . . . no, it isn’t, actually.