61–70 of 109 posts
> Well There‘s Your Problem > This is a podcast about engineering disasters and systemic failures, from a leftist perspective, with jokes
https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-143-corredor-interocea...
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How fast can modern freight trains run? If they’re twice as fast as cargo ships, maybe we need fewer tracks? And a longer land route?
The Ever Given has a maximum speed of 23kt / 42km/h and carries 20,124 TEU or approx. 7660 54-ft containers. Rail figures are harder to find, but a reasonable guess based on what I can find seems to be 400 containers per train if the loading gauge permits double stacking containers. Speeds over 100km/h are easily achievable on railways without at-grade crossings. So one ship could easily require ten trains to move al…
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The economist article also mentioned just going north around Canada
So clearly they don’t know what they are talking about. Any sailor would tell you, you don’t go above and below 55 degrees. Granted these are steel container ships but the seas don’t care. What’s one or two lost containers of goods? They sit just below the water surface for the next vessel to crash into. The Panama Canal has two paths. Only one can be used for container ships. Even that has been at capacity for quite…
Elaborate? There are major ports north of 55° and the US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the UK etc.
Water shortages? I thought the canal connected oceans and I thought the oceans were rising?
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I'm no engineer, but I would not imagine that the Panamax ships are built to handle that kinda of stress while still loaded with cargo. The ships are designed to have the weight of itself and its cargo spread out pushing out against the displaced water pushing back on the hull rather evenly and not a handful of highly concentrated points.
Just build a giant bathtub and tow that /s
Surely this is a mega project: but naively, what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails? Or this guy only needs to be scaled up 10X to do the job. Not outside the realm of imagination? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter I know the ships are huge and it shouldn’t be feasible but it would be interesting to run the numbers. Edit. Actually if my math is rig…
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The canal forms a ladder that raises ships from one ocean, up through a series of locks, into waterways that cross over the middle of the isthmus, then back down the other side. The canal itself it not all at sea level. Locks work by controlling the release of water from a high point to a low point. The water needs to already be at the high point, by tapping a river or something that's fed by rain; locks do not have…
Just adding a few small details here: 1. When the canal was built, it was deemed to hard and expensive to dig at the level of the two oceans so they imagined the locks system as a solution for that. Back then, the canal was built with US money in a time of conflict between Panama(which was part of Colombia) and Colombia. Today Panama is an independent country, but they don't have the finances to upgrade the canal. 2.…
First, at either end of the system there's a chunk of river at sea-level-ish but flowing towards the sea, so the water up at the upstream end where the lower locks are is probably not salty at all. Second, if each lock had its own pumps, doing it in 3 short lifts rather than 1 big lift to the top, then even if the one or two closest to sea-level ended up somewhat brackish, there'd be a dilution effect going up hill, and there would still be fresh water entering the system from the lakes which would tend to flush it downward. I don't think Gatun is at risk.
But what would it cost?
Okay, bullshit math time. In mixed units just to annoy metric purists:
A quick search says each lock cycle is around 50 million gallons, or 153-acre-feet. It takes 3 steps to raise them 85 feet above sea level, in energy terms let's just model it as one big step. It takes almost exactly 1kWh of energy to raise one acre-foot of water by 1 foot, so 153 acre-feet raised by 85 feet is about 13MWh per cycle. Apparently the canal manages about 40 transits per day, which I'm interpreting as each lock cycles once, so that's 521MWh of energy being provided by the rain delivering the water to the upper lakes.
Let's say we want to double that to 80 cycles a day. Oh, also, pumps are only about 70% efficient, so we actually need to provide 745MWh of power. Divide that by 24 hours and we end up with a 31MW power plant.
That's..... tiny.
Nah. Let's do it with solar. Roughly 6 hours peak sun equivalent per day (data for bocas del toro), we need 124MW of panels. The lakes have plenty of storage so there's no need for batteries, just run the pumps only when the sun is shining. Utility-scale solar runs around $1/watt installed. Labor is cheaper in Panama but conditions may be more challenging, I don't have good estimates for either of those so I'll assume they cancel out. Hey, it's napkin math!
$124M for the panels, figure the pumps and plumbing aren't cheap either but even if that's 10x the cost, we're probably still in the single-digit billions.
If they've been charging ships to use the canal like Egypt charges for the Suez, they should have quite the rainy-day, er, not-rainy-enough-day, fund for such projects. Especially if they raise prices auction-style during times of high demand, and let the high bidder through.
That seems like a no-brainer. What am I missing?
Surely this is a mega project: but naively, what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails? Or this guy only needs to be scaled up 10X to do the job. Not outside the realm of imagination? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter I know the ships are huge and it shouldn’t be feasible but it would be interesting to run the numbers. Edit. Actually if my math is rig…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#Tehuant...
For containers headed to the US east coast from the Pacific, is there any advantage of using this route and incurring two extra mode switches (sea->rail->sea), over going to a US west coast port and just incurring one (and possibly zero) extra mode switches? Given that the containers may be distributed in a variety of modes when they are unloaded at a land port (e.g. different trains, trucks, etc), it's probably reas…
Surely this is a mega project: but naively, what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails? Or this guy only needs to be scaled up 10X to do the job. Not outside the realm of imagination? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter I know the ships are huge and it shouldn’t be feasible but it would be interesting to run the numbers. Edit. Actually if my math is rig…
I'm no engineer, but I would not imagine that the Panamax ships are built to handle that kinda of stress while still loaded with cargo. The ships are designed to have the weight of itself and its cargo spread out pushing out against the displaced water pushing back on the hull rather evenly and not a handful of highly concentrated points.