This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.
Opportunity to do what?
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A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
41–50 of 128 posts
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
And remember each ship goes up as well as down - so you can theoretically recoup all the energy you used pumping.
I am sorry, how?!
You pump the water out of it into a reservaour, than later on when you need to fill it, you let it run back and generate energy.
Water power efficency is about 80-90%
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#43This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.
And no port that is constantly free from ice
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opportunity to do what?
To disrupt supply routes and perform whatever they have in their mind. Russia switched to war-time mode, so they think that they can win the war with NATO. Massive disruption in trade routes may shift balance of powers in democratic countries, which Russians may want to exploit. Russians are strong at informational front, they are strong liars and shadow players.
Whatever, but moving a significant part of all the freight from China to Europe through Russia would probably require quite an improvement on the current railway infrastructure.
It's probably a multi track system going all the way through China, Russia (with maybe Kazakhstan or Mongolia in between if they care about shortcuts), Belarus and finally to Poland. Then maybe upgrades to the European railways too to handle the excess traffic coming from the wrong direction (EU harbors are not in the East.) It's not something they can do in a short time and it takes a lot of political collaboration. I think that it's easier for them to win the war, if they can win it, and start buying Western Europe politicians again. Or just start buying them again while the war goes on.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#45This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.
An 'average' panamax container ship carries 4,200 lorries/train carriages of goods. The infrastructure to move 100K of those a day 1000s of miles on land would be enourmous and make global trade prohibitively expensive - far cheaper to sail for longer around the capes.
Yep, but those two routes around capes can be disrupted too, which may cause advantage for those, who are not using them. Then it will be easy to plant the message into brains of those 50% who have less than average IQ: "Blame your government for this sudden spike in prices! Vote for those, who want to protect us, not foreigners!"
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could pump water to the highest lock lower than the lake though. But salt water doesn't mix well with things not intended for salt water.
No you can’t: locks need to open for ship to go through and pools mix when this happen. This is also true for lockTop and LockTopMinusOne. In Panama Canal, LockTop is the lake. It’s Lake Gatún and provide fresh water for Panama City as well as other life forms in this pristine region.
How it is pristine when major part of worldwide shipping has been going through it for more than a century I cannot fathom.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#47Can't the canal authorities reduce the water used somehow? If you paired up ships so that one going up the lock system is matched with one going down you could just pump the water back and forth from one lock to the other and back. Then way less water would be lost from the system. The Falkirk wheel in Scotland can move boats with minimal electricity usage. Could a bigger one be built?
The pump is the rain. The water flows down into both oceans, evaporates there and falls down on the lake's tributary areas, then flows down into it.
That's the beauty of the whole design.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
To disrupt supply routes and perform whatever they have in their mind. Russia switched to war-time mode, so they think that they can win the war with NATO. Massive disruption in trade routes may shift balance of powers in democratic countries, which Russians may want to exploit. Russians are strong at informational front, they are strong liars and shadow players.
Whatever, but moving a significant part of all the freight from China to Europe through Russia would probably require quite an improvement on the current railway infrastructure. It's probably a multi track system going all the way through China, Russia (with maybe Kazakhstan or Mongolia in between if they care about shortcuts), Belarus and finally to Poland. Then maybe upgrades to the European railways too to handle…
Russians will not supply EU in case of war with NATO. :-/
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
And remember each ship goes up as well as down - so you can theoretically recoup all the energy you used pumping.
I am sorry, how?!
Gravity is a conservative force, so if you raise something up really high, dropping it will recover the energy used to pull it up. Of course in practice there's a lot of other things that cause energy loss, but there are lot of dams in the world that exist as "stored power", by pumping water uphill, then getting energy back as the water goes through the dam later.
Big bucket high up is basically a battery. The question then becomes about the details of, like, using the power when the water gets pumped down (if you had two canals, you could probably time filling one with draining the other?). There's a lot of practical things to consider
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#50One note - they don’t pump water out and back into the locks from a neighboring storage. They flush the water. Each ship needs like 40 million gallons? Maybe title should be insane wastes of water forces authorities…. :)
That would risk introducing salt into the resovoir and water table.