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Comment by nuc1e0n | Hacker News Reader

Can'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?

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Most locks don’t actually pump water around. The water level on one side is higher than the other, and thus there is potential energy there. That is how the locks operate

The Falkirk wheel is quite an immense structure, but each one of it's basins is only 80m long and 6.5m wide. It's moving 500 tonnes of weight each rotation (split between the two basins to keep it balanced).

To service the Panama Canal, you'd need basins 370m long and 50m wide. The new Panamax ships are apparently capable of carrying 120,000 tonnes of weight (no idea what they weigh themselves), but we're talking about swinging around half a millions tonnes of weight. My brain can't comprehend that... are there _any_ moving structures of that size in the world?

If you consider the motion and weight, a large (very large) forge would fit in this category of 250000 to 1000000 in moving mass. Its definitely something we have in our grasp. Unfortunately, youd need not only multiple falkirk wheels, but wheels of varying size, and, there would be cases where a ship might have to wait a while, as theres no equally sized ship heading the other way. On the existing falkirk you dont have to deal with the weight differences because the average boat doesnt add much compared to the water to float it, not the case when its a shipping ship.

On the Falkirk Wheel you don't have to deal with weight differences at all, regardless of the size of the ship. The ship displaces a weight of water equal to the weight of the ship. So when filled to the same level, a side with water and a side with ship+water will balance each other perfectly.

Is getting the ship across the canal even necessary when we're talking about shipping containers? a Flotilla of smaller ships for just a few containers could be used in a continuous convoy.

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.

When it rains enough it is. What's the trend looking like for that?

In Panama? If anything there will be more rain, not less.

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