The World's 25 Most Impressive Megaprojects

How do you make architecture that stuns and captivates? Well, you make things big, of course.

Around the world, gigantic engineering and infrastructure projects are opening up or are closing in on their completion. So we surveyed those finished within the last three years and those under construction to find the most jaw-dropping dams, buildings, and big machines on Earth.

How do you make architecture that stuns and captivates?

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My first thought is you need to be able to squander taxpayers money. At least that was the case of SF Bay Bridge, all because politicians thought that Oakland needed a "symbol" to connect it to San Francisco, so a simple causeway that would have cost a few hundred million turned into a fancy tower design that had a bid of 1.4 billion... and it ended up costing 5 billion more than that.

Looking at the shots they have for some of these buildings, first thing that comes to mind: "I'm so glad I don't live someplace with that much smog."

I love these projects, wish we had more currently ongoing in the USA.

The Russky Bridge in Russia.....lol


One that wasn't on there, but sounds cool is the ITER Nuclear Fusion Reactor being built in France. Note that all current nuclear reactors are Fission based.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Expected to start limited operation somewhere around 2020. Currently around $15 Billion budget.

The fuel for a Fusion is basically hydrogen and sea water, making it almost unlimited. And very little by product.

Its design is centred on heating a cloud of hydrogen gas to 10 times hotter than the core of the sun, some 150m degrees celsius, inside a ring-shaped container called a tokamak, which has superconducting magnets fixed around it like hoops fitted on a circular curtain rail. These magnets create an overlapping set of fields that keep the electrically charged gas inside from touching the sides of the tokamak and therefore losing energy.

Building a working tokamak is not straightforward. “The plasma is a bit like a lump of jelly and you are holding it with a magnetic field which is a bit like knitting wool – and imagine holding a lump of jelly with a few pieces of knitting,” says Cowley. The magnets have to be strong and Iter’s design uses superconducting magnets that only work at -269C.

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I think it's awesome that we as humans have been able to build something soly for the purpose of seeing what happens. The power plant itself is simply a proof of concept. Even if it works 100% as expected, it is not destined to ever be used as a production worthy power plant. This is only to prove the concept that unlimited energy is possible.

Between CERN and this fusion reactor, I am jealous that America can't come up with anything really ground breaking and historical in science.

Instead we buried our particule accelerator over a political spat, and we canceled the space shuttle because, well....fuck it, why not?

westrock2000 said:

This is only to prove the concept that unlimited energy is possible.

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Large but finite, not unlimited! As much as I'd love to see a few of the laws of thermodynamics break just to shake things up, they've been pretty steady so far.