Does anyone know why they are building it in a seemingly less populated/ prosperous province?
That's how most Chinese infrastructure projects start. I saw Ningbo in 1992. I look at it today and, yeah, can you say different?
I thought Three Gorges would be impossible, even for the Chinese. A few key innovations later and there it is. (Subtle innovations which, in my defense, a reasonable engineer would never have seen coming.)
If there's one thing they're good at over there, it's building infrastructure. I'll give them that.
Building a dam isn’t that hard? Definitely not impossible if you are willing to displace a few million citizens. But tunneling under granite for 30+ km? Yes, possible, but it won’t be cheap. I don’t think the Chinese would do that, it will definitely be a vacuum enclosed viaduct to match what they did with HSR.
???
Three Gorges is a mile and a half long almost. (maybe a tad longer.) Almost what? 6 or 7 hundreed feet tall. Ship locks and ship lifts too! For what? 10 thousand tons or so would be my guess? Not to mention entirely new ports to accommodate new heavy shipping inland. New walls and other flood control measures. And all of it designed to concert in such a manner that they never exceed the design specs of the dam.
Displacing citizens is the LEAST of the problems that project faced.
Building ANY dam is definitely not to be characterized as "not that hard". Building Three Gorges falls on the "near impossible even with backing of wealthy nation state" end of the scale.
But I don’t see how it was extra amazing vs. the grand coullee or hoover dams built almost a century ago.
Count the number of locks and lifts integrated with them.
Count the number of deep water ports built to concert with them.
Then you'll START to get an idea of how non-trivial Three Gorges was. It's not just a dam, though a dam even the size of Hoover or Grand Coulee would be non-trivial in themselves for us to do today. (A dam the size of Three Gorges? Not even close to being easy.) Throw in concerting projects, and to call it "not that difficult" is, frankly, laughable.
I see these claims every now and then and never have seen a decent justification. Would be great to have that to have a more informed debate ...
Some good points, but I also think that the train system is overhyped here (comparing a single hyperloop v1.0 with a single terminal with a whole train station isn't as useful as it could be.) [Aside: Also, knowing the knots Palo Alto and other cites tie themselves in to deal with the high speed lane up to San Francisco, I'm not sure that HSR there will ever be successful, no matter how much $$$ and time is spent. Drives me nuts]
I also don't know how to compare highway costs - dunno what it would cost to increase one lane between SF and LA, plus adding a lane doesn't increase capacity linearly AFAIK.
Realistically speaking, it's a lot more cost-effective to bring the slowest sections up to good enough speeds for medium-high speed rail. Each 10MPH increase in max speeds lead to diminishing returns.
Hyperloop does not compete with highways.
To get a better comparison, how many people fly from SF to LA every hour? That's the use case.
1 flight per hour sounds about right as a ball park estimate. A hyper loop beats that in capacity, and would likely be FASTER (due to not having to go through airport security).