Originally published on February 14, 2014
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Chinese engineers will submit a blueprint to the government by April for the world's longest undersea tunnel, scheduled to be completed by 2026. If the project is approved, work could start as soon as next year.
The tunnel would connect the Chinese port city of Dalian, in Liaoning province, with the city of Yantai, in Shandong province. It would be 123 km long, more than twice as long as the current record-holder in Japan, which links Honshu and Hokkaido islands and is 54 km long.
The project would actually consist of two parallel tunnels, both of them 10 m in diameter, and would house a rail line. Passenger vehicles could be loaded onto rail carriages and trains travelling at 220 km per hour. The journey between Dalian and Yantai would be slashed to only 40 minutes, compared with the existing routes, a 1,400 km drive and an eight-hour ferry ride.
According to the China Daily, the project has been proposed at the annual session of China's parliament every year since 2009.
Plans to build the tunnel were announced in 1994, at a cost of $10 billion, with completion set before 2010, Reuters reported.
Wang Mengshu, a tunnel and railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering who has worked on the plan since 2012, was quoted by the China Daily as saying it is estimated that the tunnel will cost 220 billion yuan ($36.6 billion).
Liu Zhongliang, a professor involved in the research, said the tunnel is expected to net a profit of 20 billion yuan per year and boost tourism in surrounding regions.
"The project can pay for itself within 12 years," Mengshu said.
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