Home

A federally-registered independent political party

Follow the CEC on Facebook Follow @cecaustralia on Twitter Follow the CEC on Google +


Follow the CEC on Soundcloud












Printer-friendly version

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  30th of August 2011

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Australia: Go vacuum maglev!

Australia has an opportunity to start a global transport revolution in adopting ultra-high-speed maglev evacuated tube transport. Travelling at speeds exceeding 6,000 km/h and cutting the tyranny of distance is possible with current maglev technology with the absence of air resistance in a vacuum. Anyone doubting this will soon look as foolish as Lord Kelvin, President of the British Royal Society who in 1895 said, “heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” Our vast distances between capital cities, the extensive flat terrain of the Nullarbor Plain providing distance to build up to ultra-high speeds and the prospect of an under-sea route to Tasmania, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, makes Australia the ideal nation to show the rest of the world what is possible.

China has already started testing this technology and Australia must get working immediately or we’ll be left behind. China’s Traction Power State Key Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has successfully developed a prototype model vacuum maglev train that was able to run at between 600 and 1,200 km/h, equal to the speed of a plane, according to Shuai Bin, Vice Dean of the university’s Traffic School. This is just a prototype and longer evacuated tubes will allow more distance to build up speed.

Engineers Professor Emeritus Ernst Frankel and Dr Frank Davidson have proposed a neutrally buoyant vacuum tunnel submerged 45 to 90 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean surface (avoiding deep ocean pressures) and anchored to the seafloor, through which speeds a magnetically levitated train at up to 6,500 km/h. Travel from Europe to the United States would take about an hour. Professor Frankel is a Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT and Dr Davidson is known as the father of the English Channel tunnel. “From an engineering point of view there are no serious stumbling blocks,” says Professor Frankel. “We lay pipes and cables across the ocean every day.”

Dr Davidson suggested a route across Lake Ontario built before the trans-Atlantic crossing would alleviate concerns of cost and safety. However, we Australians have an ideal opportunity to get started first and link up Tasmania to the mainland. We could additionally work with the governments of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to build transport links across the Torres Strait and even the Timor Sea. Since most of the Timor Sea covers the continental shelf, this engineering task is not as complex as it might first seem.

Vacuum maglev transport has so many exciting possibilities and is not just limited to trains. Daryl Oster holds U.S. patent number 5,950,543 for Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT), which specifies small pressurised car-sized capsules. These relatively small capsules would transport cargo or passengers travelling along evacuated tubes “arranged along predetermined routes” via computer control. Physical operation of the system is automated and users would only need to choose and enter a destination. Airlocks at stations would allow transfer without admitting air.

Once a whole network is established, passengers or cargo could travel from and to just about any location in Australia—virtually door-to-door in about an hour or less. Capsules for cargo could be a new revolution as containerisation was in reducing costs of transport. Businesses could interact Australia-wide and in the not too distant future, even worldwide, as if they were in the same city. Cars, trucks and planes would eventually go the way of the horse and buggy.

The ETT system has been adopted by Dr Zhang Yaoping, Director at the Chinese Institute of Evacuated Tube Transportation, Southwest Jiaotong University and more than a dozen licences have been sold in China. The consortium et3.com Inc (ET3 stands for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies) selling ETT licences claims their system requires only 1/50th of the propulsion energy of that used by trains, cars or planes.

The fuel savings are indeed enormous. In 2010, registered motor vehicles in Australia consumed 31,186 million litres of fuel—this is more than a $40 billion annual fuel cost. Vacuum maglev will cut out nearly all of this cost, since with conventional transport most of the energy derived from the fuel is used to combat air resistance and rolling resistance. There is zero air and rolling resistance speeding through a magnetic field in a vacuum. And not only this, the energy required for acceleration can be recovered by using linear generators to decelerate the capsules or trains.

The time saving potential is enormous. If we Australians were hypothetically paid at the average hourly wage for the time wasted in all modes of transport, this would amount to untold hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Most of this wasted time could be eliminated with vacuum maglev.

Safety systems in vacuum maglev will prove its worth in saved lives. While there’s no guarantee of a 100 per cent safe transport system, the automated nature of vacuum maglev takes driver human error out of the equation and since trains and capsules speed through a tube, they are protected from weather and obstacles—accidents on slippery wet roads won’t happen in vacuum tubes; intersection and railway crossing accidents will be left in the history books. Road crashes in Australia still cause some 1,400 deaths and 32,500 serious injuries each year. The loss of life and social impacts are devastating and the annual cost to the Australian economy is estimated to be $27 billion. Vacuum maglev will change the slogan from “speed kills” to “speed saves lives”.

This protection from weather will also have significant time saving benefits, so say goodbye to airport delays due to fog, snow, ice or volcanic ash. And there will be no sonic boom which prevented the Concorde from flying over populated areas.

The Australian Government must seize the opportunity to develop this technology, which will reap untold trillions of dollars in savings and economic spin-offs; it should be funded through national banking credit—the productivity gains demand the investment.

Join the CEC and help fight for this nation building vision.

Learn more about the countless national infrastructure projects that could transform this nation, virtually overnight. Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s Infrastructure Road to Recovery special report.
Click here to purchase a copy, $10.

To buy a copy of What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression, click here.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.



Citizens Electoral Council © 2016
Best viewed at 1024x768.
Please provide technical feedback to webadmin@cecaust.com.au
All electoral content is authorised by National Secretary, Craig Isherwood, 595 Sydney Rd, Coburg VIC 3058.