"Smart Growth" Features Bering Strait Re-Connection After 18,000 Years

May 8 (EIRNS) - Bering Strait connection re-opened, first time since ice age. The Smart Growth website reports today on the "Siberia-Alaska High-Speed Rail, Road, and Utility Link," introducing its report with the words: "Eighteen thousand years since the last maximum glaciation allowed Siberians to walk across the exposed Bering Shelf to Alaska, with the subsequent warm phase gradually raising the sea to the current level five thousand years ago without the human accelerator, Russia is planning restoration of the 3,700-mile route, whose high-speed railway, road, power and fiber-optic cables, and oil and natural gas pipelines would continue through a 64-mile undersea tunnel."

On April 24, a paper by Lyndon LaRouche was presented to the day-long conference in Moscow entitled, "Megaprojects of Russia's East: Intercontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link Via The Bering Strait."

The conference, and LaRouche's paper triggered worldwide interest in this initiative, including the Smart Growth article. "This will be a business project, not a political one," the deputy chief of Russia's agency for special economic zones Maxim Bystrow is quoted as saying. The total cost of the route, which would be built and controlled by a public-private TKM-World Link partnership project, write Bloomberg reporters Yuriy Humber and Bradley Cook, is estimated at $65 billion, including between $10 billion and $12 billion for the Bering Strait tunnel.

Coordinated with the U.S. and Canada, construction would likely take 10 to 15 years, the report says. Furthermore: "According to a Russian hydropower company official, OAO Hydro OGK deputy CEO Vasily Zubakin, the World Link would save North America and Far East Russia some $20 billion on electricity a year. It's cheaper to transport electricity east, and with our unique tidal resources, the potential is real," he observed, noting that his company will build two 10-gigawatt tidal plants in the Okhotsk Sea, along with high-voltage power lines for the new rail links and for export to North America. The transit link, he added, "is that string on which all our industrial cluster projects could hang."