Old Tunnel Plan Would Link Alaska to Russia

MOSCOW – For more than a century, entrepreneurs and engineers have dreamed of building a tunnel connecting the Eastern and Western hemispheres under the Bering Strait – only to be brought up short by war, revolution and politics.

Now die-hard supporters are renewing their push for the audacious plan – a $65 billion highway project that would link two of the world’s most inhospitable regions by burrowing under a stretch of water connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Arctic Ocean.

Russians and Americans alike made their pitch for the project at a conference titled Megaprojects of Russia’s East, held Tuesday in Moscow.

“It’s time to the rewrite the old slogan ‘Workers of the world unite!’” said Walter Hickel, a former Alaska governor and interior secretary under President Nixon. “It’s time to proclaim, ‘Workers – Unite the world!’”

A Russian economics ministry official tossed cold water on the idea, saying he wanted to know who planned to pay the mammoth bill for the project before seriously discussing it. Mr. Hickel was unfazed in his speech, saying the route would unlock untapped natural resources – and bolster the economies of both Alaska and Russia’s Far East.

The proposed 68-mile tunnel would be the longest in the world. It also would be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk – the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India – through extreme northeastern Russia, in waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there routinely hit minus 94 F.

By comparison, the undersea tunnel that is the world’s longest – the Chunnel, linking Britain and France – is only 30 miles long.

That raises the prospect of some tantalizingly exotic routes – train riders could catch the London-Moscow-Washington express, conference organizers suggested.

Lobbyists said the project is guaranteed to turn a profit after 30 years. As crews construct the road and rail link, they said, the workers would also build oil and gas pipelines and lay electricity and fiber-optic cables. Trains would whisk cargos at up to 60 mph 260 feet beneath the seabed.

Eventually, 3 percent of the world’s cargo could move along the route, organizers hope.

Maxim Bystrov, the deputy head of the federal agency for managing Special Economic Zones, injected a note of sobriety to the talk of linking East and West by road and rail.

He said his ministry would invest in the project only when private investors said they were committed to building it.

“As a ministry employee, I am used to working with figures and used to working with projects that have an economic and financial base,” Mr. Bystrov said.

“The word ‘prozhekt’ has a negative meaning in Russian. I want this prozhekt to turn into a ‘project.’”

(c) 2007 Augusta Chronicle, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.