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Topic: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination? (Read 500 times) |
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George_Harris
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Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« on: Apr 27th, 2007, 8:12am » |
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Just got pointed to an article on this subject. It is another of these things that may never be. There was recently a pitch for it or several pitches for it made at a Moscow, Russia conference on "Megaprojects in Russia's East" There are two recent article on it:
biz.yahoo.com/ap/070424/russia_tunnel_to_somewhere.html
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http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/8811965p-8712739c.html
this last is from the Anchorage Daily News, April 21, 2007.
The idea of a tunnel under the strait has been around for a long time, and is actually not that unreasonable. The strait is relatively shallow, and my understanding is geologically not that difficult, either. It is about the same as two English Channel tunnels end to end, and with the two mid-strait islands, could even be built that way. The catch is, is connects two relatively uninhabited areas that have almost no roads, no railroads, nor other infrastructure, and are seperated from it by some extremely inhospitable territory.
The major American promoter of the idea is a tunnel guy named Koumal that even has a web site www.arctic.net/~snnr/tunnel/index.html He made a presentation on the subject to an AREA conference several years ago, and was at the Moscow conference mentioned above.
Since these things do dissapear over time, here are a few of the highlights from the articles:
From the Yahoo:
Quote:MOSCOW (AP) -- For more than a century, entrepreneurs and engineers have dreamed of building a tunnel connecting the eastern and western hemispheres under the Bering Strait -- only to be brought up short by war, revolution and politics.
Now die-hard supporters are renewing their push for the audacious plan -- a $65 billion highway project that would link two of the world's most inhospitable regions by burrowing under a stretch of water connecting the Pacific with the Arctic ocean.
Russians and Americans alike made their pitch for the project at a conference titled "Megaprojects of Russia's East," held Tuesday in Moscow.
"It's time to the rewrite the old slogan 'Workers of the world unite!'" said Walter Hickel, a former Alaska governor and interior secretary under President Richard Nixon. "It's time to proclaim, 'Workers - Unite the world!'"
. . .
The proposed 68-mile tunnel . . . would also be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk -- the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India -- through extreme northeastern Russia, in waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there routinely hit minus 94 F.
. . .
Lobbyists claimed the project is guaranteed to turn a profit after 30 years. As crews construct the road and rail link, they said, the workers would also build oil and gas pipelines and lay electricity and fiber-optic cables. . . . Eventually, 3 percent of the world's cargo could move along the route, organizers hope.
Maxim Bystrov, deputy head of the federal agency for managing Special Economic Zones . . . said. "The word 'prozhekt' has a negative meaning in Russian. I want this 'prozhekt' to turn into a 'project.'"
. . .
The feasibility study alone would cost $120 million and would take two years to complete, organizers said. Actual construction of the road-rail-pipeline-cable effort could take up to 20 years.
A statement adopted at the conference Tuesday called on the governments of Russia, the United States, Japan, China and the European Union to endorse the tunnel as part of their economic development strategies. It urged government officials to raise the issue at the G-8 summit in Germany in June.
George Koumal, president of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel and Railroad Group -- the noncommercial organization pushing for the project -- said . . . there is little communication between the people living on either side of the Bering Strait.
"There are very few people who have stood on the beach in Alaska," he said. "Seemingly you can stretch out your hand and touch Mother Russia." |
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From the Anchorage Daily News:
Quote:A proposal for another big construction project is gathering headlines across the world.
A $10 billion to $12 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait linking Alaska and Russia. And another $50 billion to lay railways to make the tunnel usable.
The proponents of the 64-mile tunnel are not working off an original idea.
Over the past 150 years, at least one Russian czar and several American entrepreneurs have devised plans for linking the continents. . . . a tunnel tying Russia's Chukotka to Alaska's Cape Prince of Wales as part of a hoped-for continuous railway from London to New York. More than 6,000 miles of new rail lines -- about half laid in Siberia and the remainder in Alaska and Canada -- would connect the railheads on both sides. Siberian oil, gas, hydroelectric power and fiber optic cable could be exported through pipes built beside the high-speed rail service, they said.
Former Gov. Wally Hickel has long been a champion of big, transforming projects.
Hickel is one of the Bering Strait tunnel project's most serious supporters. He said he plans to attend the conference next week in Moscow to watch a plan he has been behind for some 25 years finally find the support it deserves.
. . .
The tunnel idea resurfaced last week when a long-time advocate of the project, Viktor Razbegin, a deputy at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, announced the Moscow conference and invited several American and Canadian enthusiasts.
. . .
Razbegin, Hickel and members of the aptly named Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group have been coordinating on the project since the late 1990s.
Enthusiasm aside, the current idea, like those in the past, is meeting skepticism. Experts have said construction in the icy Bering Strait is possible, but finding funding will be difficult.
The Russians will need to complete a huge amount of rail lines to reach the remote Chukotka region, currently only accessible by plane or boat.
"I don't mean to diminish this, but a connection to Russia through Alaska any time soon is probably no more valid than the idea that we are going to send a manned mission to Mars," said Bruce Carr, the Alaska Railroad's strategic planning director.
The state-owned Alaska Railroad has been studying the possibility of connecting to Canada's rails for more than 60 years, Carr added.
The U.S. government has shown little interest in the project. "It would be safe to say that no one here has ever heard of this thing," said Janelle Hironimus, a spokeswoman for the State Department. |
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The anchorage article has a small map.
There was also a proposal for a double deck road and rail bridge floated a few years ago. Compared to the bridge idea, the tunnel is the apex of practicality.
George
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| « Last Edit: May 1st, 2007, 2:40am by George_Harris » |
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Norm_Anderson
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #1 on: Apr 28th, 2007, 1:22am » |
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George, that's a really intriguing idea (though by the time they get it built, I suspect today's cost projections will be seen as incredibly naive).
Does this mean that the Russian State Railways are willing to re-gauge?
Regards,
Norm
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| « Last Edit: May 1st, 2007, 2:41am by George_Harris » |
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #2 on: May 1st, 2007, 2:39am » |
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Norm:
I would suspect that if it ever does happen and any rationality prevails, the line would be built at standard gauge on the Russian side down to the Chinese border. Where it crosses the Trans-Siberian you would then have some form of truck swapping or container transload facility, or maybe both. Since the Chinese system is standard gauge you could then run a Beijing - Washington (DC) train. Pause a few minutes and picture the Amtrak train set in Beijing West or the Chinese set pulled up to the bumpers at Washington Union Station. The trip would probably take about week each way. I have not attempted to figure out the distance.
I still have not dug up the article in the AREA Bulletin, but I will.
The main promoter of this idea is a tunnel guy, and the tunnel really is the easy part. It is getting to it from either end that is truly difficult. I have seen the Bering Strait from the air and gone east west over central Alaska a couple of times (I was on Detroit to Tokyo flights). Both sides have a lot of rugged country, particularly the Russian side. You go for miles and miles off the Russian coast seeing mountains dropping straight down into the sea. Hardly any sign of human habitation or impact anywhere near either end.
(By the way I went back and fixed the spelling of strait in the subject line on all the posts, including yours, Norm. One advantage of being moderator here, I get to fix my own errors even where someone else has repeated them.)
George
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| « Last Edit: May 1st, 2007, 2:44am by George_Harris » |
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #3 on: May 9th, 2007, 3:34am » |
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Found the article in the AREA Bulletin: It is American Railway Engineering Association Bulletin No. 748, Vol. 95 (1994), December 1994, pages 364-369. (Pages were numbered through the four Technical Proceedings Bulletins that made up each volume, so this particular Bulletin begins with page 341.) Article title, "Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad" by G. Khoumal. Humility is not his strong point. The article uses an occasionally confusing mix of English and Metric units. I will show dimensions with or simply change to English units.
Summary follows:
Quote:The idea of the interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel was originally proposed as far back as 1849. This paper will serve as an update of accomplishments in the past 2 years.
This is a project which would, via a tunnel under the Bering Strait, potentially connect the railroad systems of all Continents with the exception of Australia. While the tunnel seems to draw most of the general public attention, the project is all about establishing a transportation/commerce artery and an access infrastructure to large regions of this planet with tremendous natural resources presently of little use to benefit mankind. |
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A sketch map is provided that shows distances as:
-->36.25 km (22.52 miles) Alaska coast to east shore Little Diomede Island
-->10.91 km (6.78 miles) East coast Little Diomede Island to west coast Big Diomede Island
-->36.4 km (22.62 miles) West coast Big Diomede Island to west coast of Siberia
The width of the short piece of open water between the two Diomede Islands was not given.
From these distances, the Alaska Coast to Siberian Coast distance is 88.56 km = 51.92 miles. Because of the location of the islands, the tunnel has one curve in the middle portion under then islands and is slightly over a mile longer than it would be if it were straight between mainlands.
Quote:The sea is relatively shallow (maximum depth 174 feet) and that two islands in the middle make the work much easier, as does the fact that the sea bottom is formed by what appears to be a competent granite and equally competent limestone rock formations. Tunnel boring machine (TBM) technology would be applied to drive a 6 m (19.7 feet) and two 9 m (29.5 feet) diameter single line main railroad tunnels, with only the south branch to be completed in the initial phase of construction. The tunnel sections will accommodate double stack containers. Only the central portion of the northern branch would be completed in the first phase to ease train movement logistics. The northern branch will be finished later while the southern branch is full operational and revenue is being generated. Back in 1986 we calculated that the Tunnel could be constructed for about $18,100.00 per foot or a price of some $9 billion.
. . . .
The distance between Chicago and Bombay, India is much shorter via the Bering Strait than the current land/sea shipping lanes. . . . As a matter of fact, Japan can ultimately be connected to the Global Rail System by crossing the Tatarsky Strait (between Siberia and Shakalin Island) to the island of Shakalin (Stalin started work on this in 1952) and under the La Perouse Strait to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and then through the existing Seikan Tunnel to Tokyo. |
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In a few short sentences he covers the need to connect to the existing British Columbia Railroad at Fort Nelson, British Columbia, assuming using for a small part of the distance its graded but never tracked Dease Lake extension. He also makes the statement that, "The Alaskan Legislature recently approved the railroad right-of-way between Seward Peninsula and Fairbanks." No distances were mentioned for this side of the equation.
On the Siberian side he appears to be planning on hooking up with the BAM line near Culman, a distance of 2,400 miles.
Quote:| We have estimated the cost of railroad construction would be some $27 billion (between $5 million and $7 million per mile on an average) which would put the total cost of the project in 1986 dollars at a total of $37 billion. |
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Taking the mid range, this means the Alaska – British Columbia side would be about 2000 to 2300 miles.
My comments:
Perhaps not clear in his explanation: His concept is to build a utility/services tunnel and one single track rail tunnel initially plus about 2 km of second tunnel at about the half way point for a passing track. This is probably a valid concept, except that the passing track should be a lot longer to, I would say, about 5 miles total length.
First, either this $37 billion number or the more recent $60 billion number are probably both way low. We are talking mainline railroad construction in some of the most remote and inhospitable country on the planet. Everything used in the way of equipment, materials, manpower, food, power, everything will have to be hauled for hundreds of miles just to reach the job site. While he talks about connecting Japan and Bombay as part of the rationale behind the project, the work to do that is not in these numbers. We are talking two more major under sea tunnels, this time in geologically highly active areas, to reach Japan and crossing the Himalayas to reach India.
This may be picking a nit, but it also appears that his 9 meter diameter for the TBM for the main tunnel is about 1 meter too small. The space above the track for electrification and below it for drainage both appear to need to be larger. But this may be personal, because I have spent a lot of my engineering life trying to figure out how to stuff things in tunnels along side trains that were not in the plan when the tunnel diameter was selected by the “shrink wrap” the train method. The extra space that you have on the sides by placing a circle around a rather tall rectangle is probably useful for air flow, so changing shape to reduce excavated material volume may be a bad idea.
The cost estimate of his railroad would be more appropriate to Kansas. For Alaska and Siberia, I would guess somewhere upwards of $20 million per mile. He is probably better on his tunnel costs, after all, that is the guy’s profession. But still, let’s say double the cost due to remoteness of site. Let’s take a ballpark estimate of $20 million x 4,600 miles + $18 billion gets us $110 billion. That is billion with a “b” If we want to amortize the cost at a rate of return of 10% a year and no more than one cent per ton-mile above operating cost, we then have to haul 1,100 million tons of freight a year. That is above the Powder River coal lines by an order of magnitude, and way beyond the capacity of a single track railroad.
Why did I pick a number so low? Actually, even that may be too high. Given ocean freight rates, a high freight charge would mean that these rails would never see a container. Even if the line could be build for half my guess, I think this is still true.
Recall that by the time the English Channel tunnel was built, there had been a tremendous volume of freight and passenger traffic across this barrier for years and that it is in the heart of an area that has been civilized for centuries. The same is generally true for the Seikan tunnel in Japan. It was the sinking of a ferry at a huge loss of life that put this tunnel on the to-do list, and it was built by a society willing and able to spend large money of transportation projects and to fulfill a real heavy demand for moving people and freight.
I see the Bering Strait tunnel and associated railroad work necessary to make it useful as a project that is probably a couple of centuries or more in the future, unless the worst of scaremongers on Global Warming prove correct so that Alaska, Siberia, and northern Canada become the new centers of population for our planet.
George
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Hawko
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #4 on: May 24th, 2007, 10:32am » |
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Two questions. How much more difficult is it to build a railroad over permafrost & through muskeg?
How expensive would it be to lay track in Alaska or the Yukon? In the Lower 48, where labor costs are cheaper and weather & terrain conditions are usually much less extreme it costs about a million dollars to put in one mile of CTC right of way.
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #5 on: May 25th, 2007, 6:36am » |
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Hawko:
I have seen numbers closer to $2 million per mile even where minimal grading was involved. The recent restoration of 9 miles of second track just north of High Point NC was a little higher than this. BNSF has made a general statement that tunnels run about $10,000 per foot, which would give you around $50 million per mile. A major bridge will likely be in the $20 to $100 million range. BNSF quoted the second track through Abo Canyon at about $10 million per mile.
With all that, I would say that you will probably be somewhere around $5 million plus in ordinary terrain in the lower 48. Now to that we add permafrost or muskeg.
Permafrost terrain is a world of its own. There are all kinds of special techniques involved. In fact there is a whole area of study and work in Cold Country Engineering, about which I know almost nothing. Equally I know nothing about dealing with muskeg terrain.
What I do know about permafrost is that you have got to keep teh stuff from melting. There is a lot of special things done to insulate the underlying ground so that it does not warm up enough to melt. In the active zone, that is the freeze-thaw area, you have to replace the muck with a gravel material, otherwise your track will dissapear when it thaws out.
All this gets very expensive. That is why I put my guess at $20 million per mile. I would say any cost estimate that did not go up from a floor somewhere in the $10 million per mile vicinity for relatively "simple" territory would probably be too low. I put simple in quotations because that is simple in the Alaskan context, not the lower 48 context.
George
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| « Last Edit: May 25th, 2007, 6:40am by George_Harris » |
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Eddie M.
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #6 on: Jul 13th, 2007, 11:01am » |
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I know I'm weighing in late on this one........I feel that if the benefit far exceeds the cost, then yes it could happen.
You are all correct in mentioning all the factors to be considered, also in today's world with all the stupid terrorism that factor has to be figured in too.
If executed, it may take up to twenty years from begining to end.
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Political correctness is a sign of weakness.
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Walt_C
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #7 on: Jul 16th, 2007, 9:32pm » |
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Why would anyone want to build a railroad ( or any other kind of) tunnel between Alaska and Siberia?
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Please move to the rear and speed your ride-Regards, Walt
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #8 on: Jul 17th, 2007, 5:29pm » |
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on Jul 16th, 2007, 9:32pm, Walt_C wrote: (Click here for original message)| Why would anyone want to build a railroad ( or any other kind of) tunnel between Alaska and Siberia? |
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It seems to be a sort of "because it is there" thing. There is no perceivable transportation demand for it. The tunnel is actually the cheap and easy part compared to what it would take to connect it to the world on either end.
Every other major underwater tunnel that I know about was built to serve a true transport demand. Examples: Seikan between Hokkaido and Honshu in Japan, English Channel Tunnel, currently under construction Bosporus rail tunnel in Turkey.
Of all the things this world needs in the way of things constructed for the benefit of the movement of people and goods, this thing has to be several pages beyond the end of the list of things that we can find the money to actually build.
George
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GP72ACe
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - leave it alone
« Reply #9 on: Jul 21st, 2007, 2:37am » |
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This is not the time to even consider building such a thing. Putin is so hostile to the West right now, that if it were built, he'd be pouring Russian and possibly Chinese troops through it, instead of freight trains.
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Grinch
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #10 on: Aug 23rd, 2007, 4:08am » |
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The last place I would want my army would be the bottom of the ocean.
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #11 on: Aug 23rd, 2007, 2:36pm » |
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The fear of invasion was a major sticking point in tunnel under the English Channel. That had been planned for over 150 years, and was started at some time in the past, I do not remember when. The English Channel tunnel as finally built has several special fetures due to British paranoia.
But yes, marching or hauling by train your army through an under sea tunnel seems a most unlikely invasion method. Basic military tactics says any route used for troop movement must be protected. At the very least, the tunnel could not be safely used for troop movement without completely control of both the ground and the air space over the Alaska end portal. Otherwise, the invaders have simply placed themselves in the modern day equivalent of the Egyptian army chasing the Israelites across the Red Sea, except that it would only require a couple of bombs to do the work done by the hand of God 3,000 years ago.
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Nighttrain
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #12 on: Aug 28th, 2007, 9:26pm » |
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These posts have probably raised the value of General Electric stock. I would imagine GE's lighting, locomotive and turbine building divisions would greatly benefit from such a project.
If you think about the oil reserves in Alaska and given the oil and gas reserves in eastern Russia such a project isn't that wild of an idea. However, given the fact that the Bering Sea is by no means deep nor does it have substantial underlying strength and then considering the sesmic activity in this general area, you would have to engineer for a minimum 8.2 earthquake. That, I imagine would add several more dollars to the overall project.
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May your rails never rust
or your enthusiasm ever rest
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George_Harris
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Re: Bering Strait Tunnel - dream or hallucination?
« Reply #13 on: Aug 29th, 2007, 1:22pm » |
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Quote:| These posts have probably raised the value of General Electric stock. I would imagine GE's lighting, locomotive and turbine building divisions would greatly benefit from such a project. |
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I trust that you were being facetious. Even if this were to become a serious objective of the US and Russia today, it would probably still be 10 to 20 years before there would be any need to buy locomotives, power plants, etc. At this point this project appears to regarded by all but the few politicians involved as less likely to happen in our lifetimes than construction on Mars.
I know nothing really about the geology of the strait, fault line locations and types, and such like, but do not see that deep or shallow has a lot to do with the seismic design requirements. Proximity to faults, and their nature, rock types and a few other things mostly geological would, but not depth as such in the ranges likely.
The Seikan tunnel took a long time to build and was installed in an extremely faulted and seismically active area. The English Channel tunnel was installed in one single rock strata in one of the most geologically benign areas in the world. In neither case was the depth below sea level as such much of an issue.
George
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