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Comment by tesseract | Hacker News Reader

[2007]

The first hard part is building the tunnel.

The second hard part, as alluded to in the article, is that there is essentially no infrastructure (highways, railroads) within 2000 miles of the Russian terminus, and the Alaskan side is not exactly a thriving metropolis either.

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Also I don't have the numbers in front of me so it would be cool if anyone can back this up, but I believe transport by ship is cheaper per container-mile than both rail and highway transport. Is there a reason that balance would drastically change in the near future?

Harder to transmit electricity and data with ships (not that you need a road for that either though, but the article seemed to hit on the non-transport benefits quite a bit).

Undersea cable technology is fairly mature for data transmission, and rapidly advancing for power transmission (HVDC). You don't need a tunnel for either of those. That leaves the oil pipeline - which I am having trouble understanding the benefits of, because both Russia and Alaska+Canada have oil reserves, as well as more ready access to large oil markets (Europe and the continental US, respectively) that do not first require piping the oil across each other's territory.

HVDC has already been used for longer distances - for example BassLink.

You're speaking of the 3 largest countries in the world and saying having oil reserves in one part is economic for supplying the entire country.

Rail is faster than sea and truck but can't do last-mile like trucks and is more expensive than sea. Sea is the cheapest, slowest form and obviously only works port to port. Truck is fast and flexible but most expensive.

Not sure how the math works out if you have to ship stuff across Siberia, Alaska, and Canada.

But sea and trucks depends on oil. Rail can easily be electrified and energy consumption is way less than the other two anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportati...

There's no land rail connection from Alaska to the more populated parts of North America, so really the choices are ship and road--- the rail connection from Alaska to the rest of the US/Canada happens via a rail barge between Whittier (near Anchorage) and Seattle. But if you're going to send it by sea to Seattle anyway, why not just load up the ships in Russia and not bother with the tunnel?

Might change if the long-proposed connection between the Alaskan rail network and the main North American network were ever built.

Boats rarely get to take a direct route between A and B. Also the time needed to load and unload boats is a significant cost for short trips.

Both sides would develop very quickly if this tunnel were created.

Don't forget that they'll have to cross a few dozen active fault lines, too. It's not going to happen.

You nailed it.

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