Russia plans $65bn tunnel to America
Russia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait as part of a transport corridor linking Europe and America via Siberia and Alaska.
The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York. The link would be twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France.
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Russian officials insist that the tunnel is an economic idea whose time has now come and that it could be ready within ten years. They argue that it would repay construction costs by stimulating up to 100 million tons of freight traffic each year, as well as supplying oil, gas and electricity from Siberia to the US and Canada.
Maxim Bystrov, deputy head of Russia’s agency for special economic zones, said: “This will be a business project, not a political one.” The tunnel across the international date-line would be built in three sections through two islands in the Bering Strait and would link 6,000km (3,728 miles) of new railway lines. The tunnel alone would cost an estimated $10-12 billion to construct.
The scheme is being championed by Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at Russia’s Economic and Trade Development Ministry. He has long advocated a tunnel under the Bering Strait to provide a land route between Russia and the US, and published a feasibility study in the 1990s.
He told journalists that state and commercial companies would form a public-private partnership to fund and run the project. A conference in Moscow next week will propose an inter-governmental agreement with the US to underwrite construction of the transport link in return for a stake in the business.
Russian Railways is said to be examining the construction of a 3,500km route from Pravaya Lena, south of Yakutsk, to Uelen on the Bering Strait. The tunnel would connect this to a 2,000km line from Cape Prince of Wales, in West Alaska, to Fort Nelson, in Canada.
The project could save Siberia and the US $20 billion a year in electricity costs, according to Vasily Zubakin, deputy chief executive of Hydro, a subsidiary of Russia’s main electricity producer, Unified Energy Systems. The company plans to build two giant tidal plants in the Far East to supply tengiga-watts of electricity by 2020.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1680121.ece
Why didn't this make news in the US? Russian government has announced they're building a tunnel to the US and it's not even mentioned here, wtf?
Anyhow.. my Russian friends.. this has to be approved by US authorities you can't just build a tunnel. There will be environmental impact studies, how to handle customs has to be worked out.. etc. Also I'm dubious whether this is possible.. that is some nasty, rough ocean in the Bering Sea. Can they really just "build a tunnel?" Also you really need to build it from both sides, so are the Russians paying for all this? If they want the US to pay half I don't know if this could get through Congress.
If it could be done, it would be great for Alaska and Canada. Alaska is underdeveloped anyway. As for the globalist free trader aspect, I'm more comfortable with closer links to Russia and Europe than South America or China -- these super low wage labor countries are killing us.
Also this is good from a resource perspective, if the US grows at all it'll help having a transit pipeline straight to Siberia. Still.. this is odd.. the Russian government making plans for a tunnel and I never hear peep about it in my own country. And why can't we Americans do big things like this anymore.. I'm happy with infrastructure progress, but it seems like it's the Chinese, Russians, Brazilians etc. who have to do it for us.
