HONG KONG: After years of debate, Chinese scientists are close to a consensus on the design for what would be the world’s longest undersea railway tunnel, connecting the mainland to Taiwan.
If realised, shuttle trains could be whizzing through a 135 kilometre undersea section of the tunnel at up to 250km per hour by 2030.
The ambitious undertaking would include a multi-billion-yuan engineering and technical “warm-up” project, according to plans the scientists have sent the Chinese government, the South China Morning Post has learned.
Despite this technological progress, rising political tensions between the self-ruled island and Beijing, which regards it as a renegade province, mean that the scheme is unlikely to come to fruition any time soon.
However, some researchers said it was possible that Beijing would start work on the project in a unilateral, and largely symbolic move.
Politics aside, surmounting the project’s technical tests would be a huge coup for China’s scientific, engineering and construction corps, analysts said.
“It will be one of the largest and most challenging civil engineering projects in the 21st century,” said a government scientist who asked not to be named because of the project’s sensitivity.
The tunnel’s design, completed last year with funding from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the largest central governmental advisory body on infrastructural construction, has the growing support of both China’s research community and tunnelling industry, several senior civil engineering experts have told the Post.
The idea of a mainland-Taiwan tunnel had been kicking around for nearly a century. It achieved new prominence in 2016, when Beijing included a cross-strait high-speed rail network in its then-new five-year plan.
But it was only recently that scientists and engineers figured out how to build it.
In the latest plan, the tunnel would be several kilometres longer than envisaged in 2016.
Starting from Pingtan, a pilot free-trade zone area set up by Beijing in Fujian province in 2013 to boost trade with Taiwan, it would dive nearly 200 metres, cut through complex layers of rock, including extremely hard granite, dodge at least two major earthquake faults and return to the surface in Hsinchu, a coastal city near Taipei.
It would be three and a half times longer than what is currently the world’s longest undersea rail tunnel – the 37.9km Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.
The Channel Tunnel – nicknamed the “Chunnel” – took six years to build and cost the equivalent of 12 billion euros (US$13.99 billion) today.
Upon its completion in 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers dubbed the massive piece of infrastructure one of the modern world’s seven wonders.
China’s project would be laid out in similar fashion to the Channel Tunnel, consisting of a complex of three individual tunnels.
Two main passages would be used by trains running in opposite directions. In between them would be a smaller service tunnel that would contain power lines, communication cables and emergency exits.
The Chinese project, however, would separate itself from the pack – and the Channel Tunnel – with the breadth of its main tunnels. They would be nearly a third larger than their European counterparts, extending 10 metres in diameter… (CONTINUED)
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