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needed for a land-based installation will depend on the fully self-supporting with a 15-20-foot-diameter bore can depth needed to reach either a competent rock horizon proceed at rates up to 5 miles per year for a cost of 1 to beneath the sea floor or else a desired depth from a con- 1.5 million dollars per mile [in 1966 dollars]... struction point of view. Assume an installation depth of With modern-day shaft and tunnel boring techniques, 1,000 feet below the surface is desired. A probable access to the sea floor from land can be carried out at depth of shaft is then 1,200 feet. depths beneath the sea of several thousand feet (to at Shafts can be excavated by drilling and blasting, but a least 10,000 to 12,000 feet) and to distances offshore of more usable shaft with far less maintenance and damage tens to hundreds of miles. to the rock around the shaft will result from boring, a technique just now coming into general industrial use Astonishing! Here is a US Navy document from the 1960s that [mechanical shaft boring is now a common practice in plainly describes the capabilities of the underground construction the mining and underground construction industries; industry at that time as fully able to tunnel out hundreds of miles author's note]. beneath the ocean, at depths as great as two miles below the sea With a bored shaft in the range of 5 to 8 feet in diame- floor! I have spent a great deal of time in recent years reading ter, the cost will be roughly 4 million dollars completed tunnelling and underground excavation literature, and I assure you [in 1966 dollars], including the life support and service that the technology and the machinery for underground excava- systems, although some industrial firms will now estimate tion has only become more powerful and more sophisticated in a cost of about 2 million dollars for this size of installa- the intervening years. 00 tion. Large diameter shaft drilling has been well dis- cussed in the literature and extensive charts and graphs Editor's Note: for detailed cost estimating are available. This article is extracted from chapters 5 and 6 of Dr Richard Sauder's For long distance undersea tunneling, boring is espe- book, Underwater and Underground Bases, published by cially attractive. Boring methods require only electric Adventures Unlimited Press, USA, 2001. It is available in Australia, power and yield no serious fumes or gases, as would be New Zealand, UK and The Netherlands from NEXUS Magazine. the case for tunnels driven by conventional explosive methods. Boring machines are now essentially off-the- About the Author: — oo a. shelf equipment for rocks ranging from rather weak Richard Sauder, PhD, is a native Virginian who presently resides in shales to strong hard sandstones and have been used San Antonio, Texas, USA. He has an abiding interest in Forteana and arcane sciences. He is the author of Underground Bases and with encouraging results in even stronger metamorphic Tunnels (1995; reviewed in NEXUS 2/26), Kundalini Tales (1998; rocks. : . . reviewed in 6/02) and Underwater and Underground Bases With hydraulic or other automated handling of the (reviewed in 8/04). Dr Sauder welcomes solid information and ground-up waste rock, including ejection of the waste to documentation from readers on the topics he covers in his books the sea floor, tunnel boring in a rock strong enough to be as well as other esoteric or non-mainstream data. fully self-supporting with a 15-20-foot-diameter bore can proceed at rates up to 5 miles per year for a cost of 1 to 1.5 million dollars per mile [in 1966 dollars]... With modern-day shaft and tunnel boring techniques, access to the sea floor from land can be carried out at depths beneath the sea of several thousand feet (to at least 10,000 to 12,000 feet) and to distances offshore of tens to hundreds of miles. Astonishing! Here is a US Navy document from the 1960s that plainly describes the capabilities of the underground construction industry at that time as fully able to tunnel out hundreds of miles beneath the ocean, at depths as great as two miles below the sea floor! I have spent a great deal of time in recent years reading tunnelling and underground excavation literature, and I assure you that the technology and the machinery for underground excava- tion has only become more powerful and more sophisticated in the intervening years. oo Editor's Note: This article is extracted from chapters 5 and 6 of Dr Richard Sauder's book, Underwater and Underground Bases, published by Adventures Unlimited Press, USA, 2001. It is available in Australia, New Zealand, UK and The Netherlands from NEXUS Magazine. Endnotes Machines in Rock, CIRIA Special Publication 62, (Hassell E. Hunter, "Drilled Shaft Construction at 1. The Typhoons are extremely large submarines. See Construction Industry Research and Information Crownpoint, New Mexico", in Proceedings, 1983 Rapid Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, with Annette Association, London, 1988.) Excavation and Tunneling Conference, Chicago, Illinois, Lawrence Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of And the extrapolated annual rate of advance for the TBMs = 12-16 June 1983 [eds Harry Sutcliffe and John W. American Submarine Espionage, Public Affairs, New boring the Chunnel underneath the English Channel Wilson], The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, York, 1998. between France and England ranged from about 8 to 13 and Petroleum Engineers, Inc, New York, 1983, 1:544-565. 2. "For Missouri-born diver, Russian sub mission was like Miles, assuming the machines' best monthly rates of Twenty years earlier, a 9,673-foot shaft was sunk at the no other." Associated Press news article at progress. (See "Tunnel Boring Machines", Eurotunnel Western Deep Levels mine in South Africa. This shaft, http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/12/04/kursk.diver.ap/index. Website, http:/Avww.eurotunnel.com/eurouk/etplc/tbm.htm, — which extends to virtually the 10,000-foot level mentioned html. 1999.) by Van Dolah, has a lined diameter of 20 feet. ("World's 3. For example, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company The available evidence indicates that for contemporary tun- Deepest Single Shaft", The South African Mining and used a Robbins Company TBM to bore a 24'1"-diameter, __nelling machines, an average rate of five miles per year is Engineering Journal, 19 October 1962, p. 859) It is clear 22,000-foot-long tunnel during construction of the attainable even in fractured rock. In better conditions, tun- that shafts with diameters of 10 and 20 feet, that extend for Kerckhoff 2 Underground Hydroelectric Power Plant in the nel boring machines can make advances of 10 miles or thousands of feet underground, have been the state of the early 1980s. The power plant is about 30 miles northeast more per year. This is well within the state of the art in art in the mining industry for decades. of Fresno, California. Typical rates of progress were any- today's tunnelling industry. 7, Shan-tung Lu, "Undersea Coal Mining", Paper present- where from 60 to 100 feet per day. Assuming 365 days of | 4 "Japan proposes undersea tunnel to link S. Korea", ed to the Department of Mining, College of Mineral work per year, the machine should average about 5.5 miles _ http://www. indiatimes.com/221000toi/22worl!5.htm, 2000. Industries, The Pennsylvania State University, University of tunnel annually. (See Edward R. Kennedy, P.E.,"The 5. Letter from Robert W. Van Dolah, Research Director, Park, Pennsylvania, USA, March 1959. Kerckhoff 2 Underground Hydroelectric Power Plant Explosives Research Center, United States Department of 8, John L. Mero, The Mineral Resources of the Sea, Project, A State-of-the-Art Application of a Tunnel Boring __ the Interior, Bureau of Mines, to Dr William B. McLean, Elsevier Publishing Company, New York, 1965. Machine", US National Committee on Tunneling Technical Director, Research and Development, US Naval 9, George E. Sleight, "A Hydrographic Survey and Technology, Tunneling Technology Newsletter, number 38, | Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, California, 18 April Undersea Borings in Ayr Bay", Transactions of The June 1982.) 1966. Institution of Mining Engineers, vol. 112, 1952-1953, pp. An 18-mile tunnel through fractured rock in Greece yielded 6. The question as to the feasibility of deep shafts, i.e., 521-541; R. S. McLaren, "Undersea Mining off the North- extrapolated TBM net average advance rates of about 4.5 large shafts that extend thousands of feet underground, has East Durham Coast", The Iron and Coal Trades Review, 8 miles per year. (See G. Dolcini, S. Fuoco and R. Ribacchi, —_ been definitively answered in the affirmative by the mining August 1952, pp. 301-309; J. H. Pierce, "Horden, One of "Performance of TBMs in Complex Rock Masses", in industry. I will cite just two examples from the many that England's Crack Collieries", Coal Age, vol. 34, no. 7, July North American Tunneling '96, Vol. I [ed. Levent can be found in the mining engineering literature; they suf- 1999, pp. 406-409; J. T. Robertson, "Drifting Under the Ozdemir], A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and fice to prove the general point. Firth of Forth", Canadian Mining Journal, December 1964, Brookfield, Vermont, USA, 1996, pp. 145-154.) Tn the early 1980s, the Wyoming Mineral Corporation and pp. 70-71. Another study projects rates up to 10 miles of tunnel per Conoco, Inc. bored a 10-foot-diameter shaft to a depth of 10. "The Tin Mining Industry of Cornwall", Scientific year or more "to be feasible within the possible level of 2,243 feet in Crownpoint, New Mexico. They also boreda American, Supplement, vol. LXIII, no. 1635, 4 May 1907, attainment using today's machines in moderate conditions couple of other six-foot-diameter shafts to a depth of 2,188 pp. 26189-26191. and without any further advance in machine technology". feet at the same location, with the objective of developing a Conti d 85 (See D. B. Parkes, The Performance of Tunnel-Boring uranium mine at about 2,180 feet below the surface. ontinued on page 32 = NEXUS www.nexusmagazine.com AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2001