Leviosaurous
If this tunnel is such a great thing, and so many people are going to use it and it’s going to be such a money maker, why not let some private company do it? Recent SCOTUS decisions would imply that the government could condemn any private land and sell it to the developer, but on second thought the government probably owns most of the land already, and the Russian government could almost certainly be “persuaded” to sell the land. If it’s such a gold mine, why are there no private companies trying to exploit it, or buy up land in the area? If I thought it had a chance in hell I’d be buying land on both sides.
One thing the planners have forgotten is that they need to double the length of the tunnel to bring it back far enough from the coast line that when the ice caps melt and the oceans come up they do not simply flood the tunnels. 
99% of the land in Alaska is public land, owned by the Feds, the State, localities, or native corporations. These are all sorts of things…national forests, national monuments, national wildlife refuges, national parks, state forests, state parts, state wildlife refuges, local parks, military land, just plain federal lands, just plain state lands, and on and on.
Although I’m coming around to Shagnasty’s idea…some sort of car or ship that could operate over both land and sea, without requiring rails or roads. Perhaps government funding for research into such a vehicle might be a wiser investment.
Fool! Crazy dreamer! If God had meant Man to fly…
Then he would given him the plans for a 747 
Provided it could be run on something other than hydrocarbons.
Do you realize you made that same comment less than 24 hours earlier? :dubious:
It bears repeating. The advantage of trains is that they can be made to run on electricity, which can be generated in various non-fossil-fuel-dependent ways, which means we can continue to use them after the coal and oil run out.
Airplanes . . . not so much.
Only a two-seat motor glider for now, but a major step forward anyway. Fuel cells are the ground vehicle engine of the future, and near future at that, IMHO.
The nuclear engines Pratt and GE were working on in the Fifties turned out to be just too scary, not to mention impractical, but were nevertheless not hydrocarbon powered either.
In the interim, expect synthetic fuels made from coal, in the familiar old Fischer-Tropsch process, to take over some of the petroleum-derived market. USAF testing is in its early stages but no problems have arisen, and the synthetic stuff actually burns a little cleaner in the bargain.
Coal and oil are not going to run out in 500 years I don’t know how many times I am going to have to say this on the SDMB. The Alberta Tar Sands represent at least as much oil as the entire middle-east and it is being opened now so that when oil tops $80 a barrel or so, it stabilizing the market for decades to come with nice oil at only slightly higher prices with this new supply. If the unthinkable happens, the U.S. has so much coal that you can’t even wrap your head around it. We could open up our coal mines within a decade and say fuck the rest or the world and live in (sooty) peace among ourselves for centuries.
However, you seem to be making an environmentalist masturbation mistake. Building such a tunnel would would such an environmental disaster in every way that I don’t know where to begin. We would have very unnatural tunnels underwater with astronomical construction waste as well as thousands of miles of roads and supporting infrastructure. All that heavy machinery uses fossil fuels and contaminates the land as well as blocking off and disrupting wildlife. The whole strait would be contaminated for years. The Boston Big Dig took well over 20 years and still has disasters that ruin the environment and kill people. That is mere child’s play to something like this.
What is the goal again? Is it to build things that look environmentally friendly on a magazine as or things that are environmentally friendly taking into account the monumental scope of such a project?
I’m betting that they’ll follow Sir Richard Branson’s lead and go with biofuels of some kind.
I’d kinda like to see more research into nuclear cargo ships, myself, zipping cleaning across the oceans, refueling once a year…
BTW, the preferred interjection in this context is “Hurrah!”
You say tomato, I say tomahto…
my first thought, before opening the thread:
Why?
after opening the thread, & thinking about the plate tectonics involved, which apparently not as completely dire as I at first suspected:
Still, why?
I heard they’ll be using the expertise of engineers from Mexico.
I would like to see Calcium Carbonate production
They could line the tunnel with marble and get the greens singing for them.
Realistically it is just an oil and natural gas line, the ‘tunnel’ is for maintenance and inspection.
I reckon it is quite a good idea.
Eh? You mean, to ship oil and gas from one side of the Bering Strait to the other? But, which way? And why?
Why, both ways, of course! That way, we make money coming and going!
From Russia (Siberia) into the Alaskan pipework system
- that allows the Russians to sell to the USA as well as China and Europe
- it widens their customer base
Russia has shed loads of oil and natural gas and is very happy selling it to other people. Strategically it makes sense for both Russia and the USA.