Today, Elon Musk has tweeted confirmation that he has talked to the Director of CERN about building the LHC tunnel and saving several billion Euros for the FCC projects.
The principal structure of the FCC-hh collider is a quasi-circular tunnel composed of arc segments interleaved with straight sections with a diameter of 5.5 meters and a circumference of 97.75 km. Approximately 8 km of bypass tunnels, 22 shafts, 14 large caverns and 12 new surface sites are also planned.
Boring Company tunnels are currently 3.8 meters in diameter. The area of the FCC tunnel would be 23.76 square meters. The Boring Company single-bore tunnel was constructed used a 4.2-meter (14 ft) diameter tunnel boring machine which gives a finished 3.8-meter (12 ft) internal diameter tunnel. The Boring company tunnel is 11.34 square meters.
The wider FCC tunnel would take about twice as long and would cost about twice as much.
Elon Musk recently proposed building a two-way 50-kilometer tunnel for Australia through mountains for $750 million. It is not clear if Elon Musk was talking about Australian dollars or US dollars. If it was Australian dollars then the price in US dollars is about 1.4 times less.
A future collider tunnel that is twice as long with twice the diameter (but one-way) would still be $1.5 billion from Boring Company. This would save $4.2 billion the cost of the 5 billion euros project. (US$5.7 billion). This is based upon near term price quotes for the Australia project. However, Boring Company will be massively lowering costs. The Future Collider tunnel could be built by the Boring Company after a few years of planned improvements for only $300 million.
Director of CERN asked me about Boring Co building the new LHC tunnel when we were at the @royalsociety. Would probably save several billon Euros.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2019
CERN’s head of media relations, Arnaud Marsollier confirmed to Ars Technica that the discussion occurred in July 2018. Elon Musk and Fabiola Gianotti [the Director of CERN] happened to meet back in July last year at a ceremony of the Royal Society for new Fellows & Foreign Members. In view of projects for future larger accelerators, CERN is open to new, cost-effective technologies that could lead to their implementation, including the tunnels that will be needed.”
Boring Company is Talking to Australia About a 50 Kilometer Tunnel
Elon Musk is offering to build a two-way high-speed tunnel under the
About $15M/km for a two way high speed transit, so probably around $750M plus maybe $50M/station
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2019
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