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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it will be used to fund new tunnelling and/or bridge technologies - the current government seems surprisingly keen on connecting NI to Scotland....

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That’s a very different kind of bridge-or-tunnel tho.

> fund new tunnelling

is this supposed to be a double entendre ? I don't see how this follows from the parent comment.

The comment is making fun of a proposal Boris Johnson once made about building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland, which is considered borderline physically impossible as far as I understand.

Bridge, yes.

Tunnel, no. It’s very feasible and practical from a civil-engineering perspective, but the economic value of a road connection between NI and Scotland has not been demonstrated to outweigh the economic cost of its construction.

Infact: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/14/rail-bosses-...

Even more fun: the relevant area of sea has had one million tons of explosives dumped there as well as chemical weapons and even some radioactive waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort%27s_Dyke

What’s feesible? The tunnel or the bridge? I’d heard the tunnel wasn’t possible due to the particular geography of the channel. But a bridge? Now that I’d be interesting I seeing. There used to be a giants causeway across there in mythical times ...

The bridge is unfeasible because the channel is around 200m deep in places which makes it crazy expensive. I also found a couple of references to nuclear waste in the trench, but that might have been for another site.

Both of which I was aware of but I heard that some kind of suspension design would work. The tunnel is infeasible because there’s a very deep trench there, and that as you mentioned is filled with all sorts of nasty stuff.

I believe the latest proposal would swerve to avoid the trench.

Floating bridge is a thing tho https://www.wired.com/2016/04/takes-keep-7700-foot-floating-....

There was a suggestion that he was trying to do a bit of SEO to distract attention from another bridge [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Bridge

I hadn't heard of this one. That and the brexit bus/cardboard box bus SEO hacking suggestion makes something of a pattern.

There is talk of floating tunnels.

I believe they have done similar things in Norway when they need to go across fjords which are about 1km deep on places.

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