Whatever their budget - there isn't enough unobtainium around to construct tunnel wall strong enough.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161018110338/http://jr.hakodat...
> Minimum overburden (under seabed): 100m
> Maximum sea depth: 140m
Excuse me for being daft, is the difference going to be a showstopper ? Construction and material engineering surely advanced since quite a bit.
At the Straits of Messina, the tunnel would be crossing an active rift zone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siculo-Calabrian_rift ). That rift is the source of those big earthquakes - such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_Messina_earthquake - which was at the Straits, magnitude 7.1, and killed ~75k people. And for extra bonus fun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_etna - is one of the world's most active volcanoes, part of that active rift zone, and less than 80km from the Straits.
(Vs. the geological maps I can find seem to show that the Seikan tunnel does not cross any sort of active fault.)