Denmark and Germany Now Building the World's Longest Immersed Tunnel (cnn.com) 78
Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, the world's longest immersed tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times between the two countries when it opens in 2029. CNN Travel reports: After more than a decade of planning, construction started on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel in 2020 and in the months since a temporary harbor has been completed on the Danish side. It will host the factory that will soon build the 89 massive concrete sections that will make up the tunnel. "The expectation is that the first production line will be ready around the end of the year, or beginning of next year," said Henrik Vincentsen, CEO of Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "By the beginning of 2024 we have to be ready to immerse the first tunnel element."
The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros ($7.1 billion). [...] It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rodby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways -- separated by a service passageway -- and two electrified rail tracks. "Today, if you were to take a train trip from Copenhagen to Hamburg, it would take you around four and a half hours," says Jens Ole Kaslund, technical director at Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "When the tunnel will be completed, the same journey will take two and a half hours."
"Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train," he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.
The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros ($7.1 billion). [...] It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rodby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways -- separated by a service passageway -- and two electrified rail tracks. "Today, if you were to take a train trip from Copenhagen to Hamburg, it would take you around four and a half hours," says Jens Ole Kaslund, technical director at Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "When the tunnel will be completed, the same journey will take two and a half hours."
"Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train," he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.
Lolland (Score:5, Funny)
the Danish island of Lolland
Just like Holland, but funnier.
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We already have enough drilled oil wells. Production is deliberately cut back to maintain "price stability." Production of oil in the Us was nearly 14 million barrels per day before the pandemic .. now, it's down to 11 million because they deliberately reduced production when demand dropped. That's the whole point of the petroleum oligopoly, restrict production to keep prices high. I will bet coal is the same way.
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ICEs increase the cost of tunnels because they need ventilation for the fumes.
In the future, many tunnels will be "EV only".
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This tunnel is already depending on progress on emissions... A tunnel would not have been economically feasible with ventilation shafts. Instead it relies entirely on horizontal ventilation.
The original plan was to open the tunnel in 2021, which obviously did not happen, and Dieselgate could have jeopardized the original plan. However, with the 9 year delay, emissions won't be a problem.
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They probably won't ban ICE vehicles, just rely on them being a small proportion of the total.
The ventilation is still required, not least to extract smoke in the event of a fire. With most people driving EVs they will be able to run it at lower capacity, but for comfort they won't want to stop it.
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We need more than electricity for vehicles. To get aircraft and rockets to fly we will need synthesized hydrocarbons. We will need nuclear power to produce them because nuclear fission will produce heat at a temperature that aids in the production of hydrocarbons, solar can't get hot enough (not directly anyway). Using electricity to get the required temperatures would work but also be expensive.
Maybe running internal combustion engines would be banned from the tunnel but we can have plug-in electric hyb
Re: Maybe they should drill an oil well instead. (Score:2)
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They seem to be able to smelt aluminium in Iceland without nuclear power.
The world is not Iceland. We don't have a practical means to pipe that hydro and geothermal energy to space. Even in Iceland they rely on fossil fuels for heating, cooking, transportation, and in some remote places also electricity. If Iceland were to get rid of fossil fuels then they'd need nuclear power.
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We don't have a practical means to pipe that hydro and geothermal energy to space.
To space, no, to other earth-bound locations, we have methods for that. You will probably mention rockets in reply, but note that I am talking about methods to create synthetic fuel, so that would be missing the point I am making.
In terms of fossil fuels for electricity generation to remote places, that's about cost for a few people, and an operation to create synthetic fuels would not be a small concern, so your point has no particular bearing. If the cost of hydro generation plus transport of that power
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So maybe we should call this "The Lolland Tunnel"?
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Germany wants to be rid of their nuclear weapons.
Germany has no nuclear weapons.
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There's plenty of examples of nuclear power plant getting built on time and under budget
Yet, every time you are asked to provide an example, you have nothing. Can you name one nuke from a non-authoritarian country completed on time and under budget in the past 30 years?
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Yet, every time you are asked to provide an example, you have nothing. Can you name one nuke from a non-authoritarian country completed on time and under budget in the past 30 years?
You have already stated that you have no intention to change your mind on the failure of nuclear power so I see little point in debating you. You defined "success" so narrowly that nobody can meet it. If nuclear power was such a failure then how is it that we have over 400 civil nuclear power reactors in operation today, with more under constructions? I call all 400+ successes. If you don't believe them to be successful then name each one and describe how they failed.
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I call all 400+ successes.
But we also have 8000 thermal coal plants, largely due to the anti-nuclear lobby. I laugh when anti-nuclear types complain about climate change. More than anyone else, they actually deserve it.
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Logical fallacy: Nuclear is not the only alternative to coal.
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Logical fallacy: Nuclear is not the only alternative to coal.
It effectively was while many of those coal plants were being built. If you were protesting nuclear in the 70s and 80s, that really meant go coal!!! (maybe hydro if you were lucky enough to ignore the people also protesting that). Solar and wind were not even things then.
Have to laugh at people who claim to not know that was the defacto choice. Like they never think past step one. Still common today.
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If your point is that nuclear made a lot more sense 50 years ago than it does today, I don't really disagree.
Back then, there were fewer options.
Today, nuclear is not an alternative to coal. No new coal plants are under construction or even planned in America.
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You have already stated that you have no intention to change your mind on the failure of nuclear power so I see little point in debating you.
The point of a debate is not to convince your opponent but to convince the audience.
You defined "success" so narrowly that nobody can meet it.
Then define your own measure of success.
Vogtle will cost Georgia consumers $0.25 per kwh when it (finally) comes online. That is several times what other Americans pay. Do you consider that a success?
The Virgil C. Summer AP1000 reactor cost $3 billion and will never produce a single watt. Was that a success?
Hinkley will produce power for $0.30. Is that one a success?
Olkiluoto cost more than double the original budget, wa
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...Can you name one nuke from a non-authoritarian country completed on time and under budget in the past 30 years?
Authoritarian countries can complete nukes on time because Green activists aren't obstructing them at every step. This is the whole point of Green activism, and why Germany is the movement's spiritual capital.
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The financial debacles at Vogtle, Summer, Hinkley, Olkiluoto, etc. were not caused by green obstruction.
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My point is that once a nation has started on the path of building nuclear reactors then it will naturally follow to want nuclear fission power plants.
Er . . . What? You do know that nuclear fission power plants are the only ones that practical at this point? Nuclear fusion plants are at best theoretical.
And Germany has built nuclear power plants before, so it will be difficult to not build more.
How so? Power plants of any kind are not something you just build if you wanted. Capital projects take time and money to build. Now add into the complexity that it is nuclear powered and you are talking regulations, fuel supply, disposal, etc.
If any nation wants nuclear weapons then building a fleet of civilian nuclear power plants will aid in that effort.
Er . . . what? You do know that nuclear weapons use different fuel than nuclear power plants, right? You also know
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Er . . . what? You do know that nuclear weapons use different fuel than nuclear power plants, right? You also know that nuclear weapons materials are specially made for weaponry, right? While power plants can use the same fuel as weaponry, it would require a large refit and would cost a great deal more than just to use nuclear fuel.
Yes, indeed, nuclear power plants use different fuel than weapons. The nuclear power plants can "eat the leftovers" from the weapon production. Also, it takes a lot of energy to refine and enrich uranium so by building a nuclear power plant a country has the power to run all the equipment and have plenty left over for things like cooking food and heating their homes.
Why "only three choices"? You do know that Germany gets about 40% of their energy today using renewable sources, right? The fact that you did not seem to know that underscores your very ignorance of the topic.
You appear to be ignorant that by being so overly reliant on renewable energy Germany has been facing energy shortages and high energy prices
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The nuclear power plants can "eat the leftovers" from the weapon production.
What does that mean? 1) You do know that power plants have to be refitted to use weapons grade nuclear materials, right 2) Weapons grade material is exponentially more costly than power plant grade so using leftovers make as much sense as saying that cars should use jet fuel if their gas stations run out of diesel.
Also, it takes a lot of energy to refine and enrich uranium so by building a nuclear power plant a country has the power to run all the equipment and have plenty left over for things like cooking food and heating their homes.
Again you are aware that weapons grade uranium production is exponentially more difficult as the starting material is the uranium refined for power plants. That says nothing about plutonium produc
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What does that mean? 1) You do know that power plants have to be refitted to use weapons grade nuclear materials, right 2) Weapons grade material is exponentially more costly than power plant grade so using leftovers make as much sense as saying that cars should use jet fuel if their gas stations run out of diesel.
I'm referring to MOX fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
When making nuclear weapons there will be a lot of depleted uranium. Over time these nuclear weapons will age and the plutonium in the cores will have to be disposed of somehow. One way to dispose of this material is with nuclear power. The mix of weapon grade material with depleted uranium is designed to be suitable for reactors that were built for running on LEU. If the reactor has to be refitted to use this fu
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When making nuclear weapons there will be a lot of depleted uranium. Over time these nuclear weapons will age and the plutonium in the cores will have to be disposed of somehow. One way to dispose of this material is with nuclear power. The mix of weapon grade material with depleted uranium is designed to be suitable for reactors that were built for running on LEU. If the reactor has to be refitted to use this fuel then you are doing it wrong, the point is to not have to refit the power plant but adjust the fuel to match the requirements of the power plant.
*Sigh*. 1) Germany has zero nuclear weapons thus it does not have any weapons grade material to "dispose of". 2) From your own link: "Existing nuclear reactors must be re-licensed before MOX fuel can be introduced because using it changes the operating characteristics of a reactor, and the plant must be designed or adapted slightly to take it."
Refit is necessary. Again you cannot just use jet fuel in an automotive diesel car.
The "leftovers" I referred to is the depleted uranium, and the weapons cores that have aged to a point they are no longer reliable, both are byproducts from nuclear weapon construction that can be used for fuel in a nuclear power plant.
And the practicality and cost? It is costlier and not as practical as you think. [wikipedia.org] A
Re: Where will the electricity come from? (Score:2)
Seems like a lot of money (Score:4, Interesting)
It's currently a 45-minute ferry trip; after this tunnel is dug it'll be a 10-minute car trip. It's currently a 4.5 hour train trip; afterward it'll be a 2.5 hour train trip. Is that really worth seven billion Euros?
It's not my money, so I guess I'm mainly asking any locals for their opinion.
Re:Seems like a lot of money (Score:4, Informative)
It's currently a 45-minute ferry trip; after this tunnel is dug it'll be a 10-minute car trip. It's currently a 4.5 hour train trip; afterward it'll be a 2.5 hour train trip.
You are comparing apples & oranges.
10 minutes is the time to transit the tunnel.
2.5 hours is the time to travel the entire distance from Hamburg to Copenhagen. The tunnel transit is only a small part of that.
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Per TFS, it's 2.5 hours versus 4.5 hours - not versus 10 minutes. The 10 minute comparison was against the current 45 minutes to cover the same distance.
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Having flashbacks from the 1970s? Even the most creative anti-war propaganda doesn't place the cost anywhere near that amount. Large portions of the creative accounting also includes the salaries of all military personnel on active duty, whether they were in the conflict zone or not.
Finding alternatives to armed conflict is good. Don't weaken your message by repeating fictitious and confusing alternative facts when there are more constructive ways to encourage better policy decisions.
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$10 trillion "the US is an aggressor" babbling and constant references to "40-50mpg family cars" is pretty much 90% if this imbecile's ramblings. He sounds like a Libertarian hippy with delusions of competence.
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Well it costs $120 each way with the ferry unless you have planned a month ahead and can arrive at a specific time so I would say there is plenty of money.
And since they apparently have removed the lunch/dinner buffet in the restaurant and replaced it with cold burgers, the driving break has just become annoying.
If I need to go longer than Hamburg and charge the car, I’d rather take a break at the supercharger in Braak where the good bakery is with also has sandwiches.
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Is it $120 each way? I looked it up and it said around 350 kr, which would be around $32, but maybe that's a special rate from what you're saying. Someone else was asking if 7 billion Euros was worth it and I was comparing against ferry costs with a speculative number of trips per year (two million) and a speculative tunnel lifetime (50 years) and came up with it costing about twice as much as the ferry with two million, but less if it was a bit over four million. If the ferry is actually $120, then the tun
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You also need to consider that taking a ferry is a pain. So, the traffic going from Germany to Denmark and back will likely triple (or more) over what the traffic is now on the ferry. AND, some portion of the air traffic will use the tunnel instead. AND, that will create a "higher traffic" corridor on the route, encouraging growth, industrialization, shopping, etc.
Can't just count the ferry it replaces - it does a whole lot more than that. I would say look at the impact that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tu
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You also need to consider that taking a ferry is a pain. So, the traffic going from Germany to Denmark and back will likely triple (or more) over what the traffic is now on the ferry. AND, some portion of the air traffic will use the tunnel instead. AND, that will create a "higher traffic" corridor on the route, encouraging growth, industrialization, shopping, etc.
Oh sure. That's very true. I was just using the traffic on the ferry as a baseline. Also, they just said that millions of people used the ferry and I took the bare minimum that could mean to be two million, but it could actually be a lot more. I went into it more in my other post. I also considered the value of time wasted although I didn't put a specific value on it and I also didn't put a value on the distress caused by having to deal with the ferry beyond just the extra time.
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It is like wasting money on a bus when you could just walk the three miles.
Re:Seems like a lot of money (Score:4, Insightful)
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But seriously, what's not to like about the high speed train from Copenhagen to Hamburg or Berlin taking 2 hours less time?
There's a deliberate policy & plans in place to connect the whole of the EU with high speed rail networks. This is just one of the more spectacular projects out of many. Laying train tracks through some of the mountainous regions (e.g. Alps & Pyrenees) will be even more spectacular
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If this were the USA, the train company would be suing the tunnel company for loss of profits.
No, some coalition of patchouli-scented San Francisco activists would be monkey-wrenching the tunnel company's construction equipment in the name of whatever tribe had owned the land the tunnel passes through before the end of the Ice Age raised the ocean level and flooded it.
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Is that really worth seven billion Euros?
They say in the summary that millions of people take the ferry every year. So that seems to be a minimum of two million trips per year using the tunnel, which will probably be good for at least 50 years. So that would be about 70 Euros per per trip. That's more than two hours of driving will typically cost (if you don't place any value on the time of the driver) and about twice what the ferry costs (once again, if you place no value on the time of the person making the trip). If it's more like four million
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The time savings of 10^5 - 10^6 people per year over a decade or two easily is worth 7 billion Euro.
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It's currently a 45-minute ferry trip; after this tunnel is dug it'll be a 10-minute car trip. It's currently a 4.5 hour train trip; afterward it'll be a 2.5 hour train trip. Is that really worth seven billion Euros?
It's not my money, so I guess I'm mainly asking any locals for their opinion.
Well it sounds like it will be 2 hours faster than the train and an hour faster than flying. Lets just split the difference and say it saves 1.5 hours per journey?
As for how many passengers, I couldn't find a clear estimate but currently 1000 train passengers/day and 2 million cars by ferry per year [tunnel-online.info].
Lets assume the tunnel takes 25% of those cars and their average occupancy is 1.5 passengers (and same for the train passengers). So
1.5*2e7*.25/365 + 250 = 20,797 passengers/day
Now take that number * 1.5hrs over
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Agree with most of your statement, but peace and stability? There are roads and trains directly to and from blue states and red states in the US and it hasn't done that.
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Agree with most of your statement, but peace and stability? There are roads and trains directly to and from blue states and red states in the US and it hasn't done that.
It's hasn't solved it, but it has probably helped. In general, the more travel you have between regions the less conflict you'll have between them. A major reason for the existence of the EU is to prevent war between European powers, and unrestricted travel between EU states is a big part of that.
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Current ferry crossing takes about 45 minutes.. And millions of passengers use the ferry yearly, according to the article. Lets put it at the minimum to qualify as millions - 2 million.
The tunnel will drop the crossing time to 7 or 10 minutes, depending on mode of transport (car or rail).
Lets call it 10 minutes. Thats 35 minutes savings per passenger, per trip. So at just 2 million passengers per year, that is just over 133 years of time savings (according to google), per year.
If it's more then 2 million, i
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It's currently a 45-minute ferry trip; after this tunnel is dug it'll be a 10-minute car trip. It's currently a 4.5 hour train trip; afterward it'll be a 2.5 hour train trip. Is that really worth seven billion Euros?
It's not my money, so I guess I'm mainly asking any locals for their opinion.
You are thinking it in terms of individual cases, and not as a whole, in the aggregate.
Think of it this way. Imagine we are improving a network, and we only focus on the average RTT of a single IP packet as the sole justification for ROI, with the network improvements considered in isolation.
In such a case, we are ignoring other valuable considerations of the network improvement itself, such as bandwidth, throughput/goodput, IOPS, packet sizes, as well as the impact these improvements can have on an ent
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Yes, it's worth it from an EU perspective.
The EU's main goal is better connecting their countries. At the moment parts of Denmark and Sweden are not efficiently connected to mainland Europe. You have to take regional trains or winding motorways in a C shaped route, to get between Copenhagen and Hamburg (for example). They also pass through the center of Denmark's 3rd biggest city. Sweden is worse because they have to traverse through half of Denmark to get to Germany.
I use these motorways in my daily commut
You can't have that (Score:2)
"Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train," he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.
This simple arithmetic is far beyond the abilities of the U.S. outside a few routes in the east. I don't think I will see it in California in my lifetime.
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Don't be so negative. The high-speed rail route from Madera to Fresno is already under construction.
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This simple arithmetic is far beyond the abilities of the U.S.
The California high-speed rail project would make sense if it cost $10B and could be completed in five years.
But it will cost ten times that much and take 30 years to complete. That is insane.
I don't think I will see it in California in my lifetime.
Indeed. That's the problem.
Not the longest underwater tunnel (Score:2)
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TFS claims that this will be the world's longest underwater tunnel, but it won't be. The Chunnel [wikipedia.org] is at least three times as long.
From TFA: "Although longer than the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel, the Channel Tunnel was made using a boring machine, rather than by immersing pre-built tunnel sections." Keyword left out is "immersed", which seems is a different type of tunnel construction technique than was used for the Chunnel.
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TFS claims that this will be the world's longest underwater tunnel, but it won't be. The Chunnel [wikipedia.org] is at least three times as long.
From TFA: "Although longer than the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel, the Channel Tunnel was made using a boring machine, rather than by immersing pre-built tunnel sections." Keyword left out is "immersed", which seems is a different type of tunnel construction technique than was used for the Chunnel.
That's right, the "immersed tube" tunnel is made from prefabricated sections that are floated and towed into position and then sunk to rest on the seabed: https://railsystem.net/immerse... [railsystem.net]
This is a technique used for shallow bodies of water - pressure on the tunnel increases with depth, so a tunnel under deep water needs to go through the rock _under_ the seabed. As you say, like the Channel Tunnel between England and France.
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By way of comparison, the 50-kilometer (31-mile) Channel Tunnel linking England and France, completed in 1993, cost the equivalent of £12 billion ($13.6 million) in today's money. Although longer than the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel, the Channel Tunnel was made using a boring machine, rather than by immersing pre-built tunnel sections.
So the main difference is that this tunnel will carry road and rail traffic, while the Channel tunnel is exclusively a rail link (with cars carried on trains).
ISTM the qualification of this being an "immersed" tunnel would only be of interest to tunnel engineers. For everyone else, it's irrelevant.
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ISTM the qualification of this being an "immersed" tunnel would only be of interest to tunnel engineers. For everyone else, it's irrelevant.
Tunnel engineers and nerds. You know, "News for nerds, stuff that matters".
High pressure job (Score:1)
Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, (Score:2)
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Highways and high speed rail have a much higher capacity than a ferry. In other words, a lot more people can move through this infrastructure than the ferry service could ever have accommodated.
Seems like a lot of money (Score:1)
Why not post a map...? (Score:1)
The cited article has nice artist's renderings of the entryway, the inside, and the factory, but no route map.
It always amazes me when media fails to include a map.
Wikipedia has a map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The cited article has nice artist's renderings of the entryway, the inside, and the factory, but no route map.
It always amazes me when media fails to include a map.
Wikipedia has a map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And that is what makes the value of the tunnel so clear. Because the island of Lolland is already connected to mainland Scandinavia by bridges and tunnels, this project will be the first direct link to Germany.
Largest infrastructure project?? (Score:1)
The summary flunks geography forever. (Score:1)
> the tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey
> times between the two countries when it opens in 2029
This is just a ridiculous summary. Denmark and Germany share a land border.
Depending on where in Denmark and where in Germany you're travelling to/from,
a journey from the one country to the other can be thirty seconds long. There's
not a lot of room to improve on that.
What the tunnel is actually doing, is linking a couple of Denmark's major islands (one
of which notably h