The underground excavation industry is exploring mini robots, plasma torches, and superheated gas to replace the massive boring machines now in use. For decades, engineers seeking to build tunnels underground have relied on huge tube-like machines armed with a frightening array of cutting wheels at one end—blades that eat dirt for breakfast. These behemoths, called tunnel-boring machines, or TBMs, are expensive and often custom-built for each project, as were the TBMs used to excavate a path for London’s recently opened Elizabeth Line railway. The machines deployed on that project weighed over 1,000 tons each and cut tunnels over 7 meters in diameter beneath the UK capital. But British startup hyperTunnel has other ideas. The firm proposes a future in which much smaller, roughly 3-meter-long robots shaped like half-cylinders zoom about underground via predrilled pipes. These pipes, around 250 millimeters (10 inches) in diameter, would follow the outline of the proposed tunnel’s walls. Once inside them, the bots would use a robotic arm topped with a milling head to penetrate into the surrounding earth and carve out small voids that would then get filled with concrete or some other strong material. Piece by piece like this, the structure of a new tunnel would come together. “We’re talking about thousands of them,” says hyperTunnel’s director of engineering, Patrick Lane-Nott. “Much like an ant colony or a termite colony works in swarms.”
A video released by the company includes a 3D animation of the robots beavering away on some imagined subterranean structure of gargantuan proportions. But it would be rather like building tunnels in reverse. With a TBM, you first dig the hole and then add supports or walls to keep the remaining earth surrounding the void at bay. “We put the tunnel in the ground—and then we dig the hole,” says Lane-Nott. Once the structure has been built, the material filling the tunnel’s chamber can be removed. One advantage of this, he argues, is in using less building material overall. Instead of placing standardized sections of tunnel wall along the entire length of the project, the structure’s outer thickness could vary to suit the actual geology and pressures surrounding the tunnel at any given point. Tunneling experts who spoke to WIRED agree that the industry is crying out for technological solutions to lower costs and heighten efficiency—it can take years to design and build a TBM and then actually dig a tunnel with it, for example. A suite of new companies promising to shake things up is emerging—from Elon Musk’s Boring Company to hyperTunnel and firms developing new high-temperature methods of blasting through the toughest rocks on Earth. Most Popular
By WIRED
“There’s a lot going on, and I think that’s good, because the tunneling industry has to improve,” says Jasmin Amberg, a project manager at Amberg Engineering, an underground construction company founded by her grandfather. In her eyes, the business of tunnel boring needs to get faster and more sustainable. Pipes are drilled into the rockface (blue), and from within them robots (orange) construct the walls of the tunnel before the central chamber is cleared.Illustration: hyperTunnel
There’s no shortage of work out there, either. China recently completed a 20-kilometer railway tunnel in the Longmen Mountains after a decade of construction. There’s the HS2 rail project in the UK, which will connect London to towns and cities in the north of the country and is set to feature more than 100 kilometers of tunnels along its proposed route. And Peter Vesterbacka, who used to work for Angry Birds developer Rovio, is behind an ambitious plan to build an undersea tunnel between Finland and Estonia. These are but a few examples. Amberg forecasts increasing demand for underground infrastructure in the future—not least as a means of escaping rising temperatures above ground due to climate change. “It’s maybe not so bad to have a place where we have more constant temperatures,” she says. Most Popular
By WIRED
Tunnels aren’t just for transportation. Troy Helming, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based startup EarthGrid, emphasizes the need to put power lines underground—this is what his company aims to do. The vast majority of transmission cables are above ground in the United States and Canada, he notes, leaving them exposed to hurricanes and other storms as well as, increasingly, wildfires. “Our plan is to put a supergrid across North America,” he says, proffering a map with colored lines showing said grid stretching all the way from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, and future offshore wind farms in the west. It’s a plan that could help link up the fragmented US grid —and potentially one day even extend as far as Europe, to tap the huge offshore wind potential there. “It’s crazy and audacious, and we know that,” says Helming. One hurdle is the extremely tough rock, such as granite and quartzite, that makes traditional excavation in some of these places difficult or impossible. Helming is betting on plasma torch technology that heats rock to about 6,000 degrees Celsius, blasting it to smithereens, as the solution. He suggests that this could allow for the creation of tunnels in hard rock 100 times faster than with current technology. EarthGrid is developing a prototype robot wielding five plasma torches, which Helming says should be ready for testing in March 2023. The firm also aims to complete its first, small-scale commercial project by the end of this year. Helming notes that, in EarthGrid’s case, the tunnels will not be circular in shape but rather a traditional horseshoe—imagine a square with an arch on top, instead of a flat ceiling. This, he argues, makes it easier to install cable racks or, in larger transportation tunnels, a road surface on the flat base of the tunnel. Rival company Petra also aims to bore through tough rock using the power of heat , though with a thermal cutting device that uses a superheated fluid rather than with a plasma torch. The idea is to slice through “nightmare geologies” with relative ease, says CEO and cofounder Kim Abrams. “We finished a 34-foot, 30-inch-diameter tunnel in granite just last week,” she says, adding that the firm hopes to begin commercial work next year. And she mentions that the company is also working on a separate solution to tackle the other end of the spectrum—extremely soft or water-logged soil, such as is often found beneath and near coastal cities. Most Popular
By WIRED
These tunneling technologies have yet to prove that they can succeed at scale, notes Amberg. She says hyperTunnel’s concept is interesting, but adds that she is unsure how the robots will tackle harder geologies or water-logged ground, for instance. Jian Zhao is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University in Australia. He and colleagues have explored the use of laser, microwave, and high-pressure waterjet technologies, among others, for tunnel-boring applications. He’s skeptical that Petra’s heat-based method, for example, will itself be sufficient for large tunneling projects, but he wonders if it could be used alongside mechanical excavation. “The seed funding, angel investing, and all that to fuel some of this innovation, I think, is fantastic,” says Michael Mooney, who is the Grewcock Chair Professor of Underground Construction and Tunneling at the Colorado School of Mines. He agrees that the “jury is still out” as to whether any of these new tunneling technologies will break through to large-scale commercial success, but he stresses that faster, cheaper techniques are very much sought-after in the industry. He also argues that the Boring Company, which is developing its own kind of TBM that can be launched from the surface to dig underground tunnels (conventionally, for these you’d dig a hole first and then move the TBM down into it to create the tunnel), has also innovated in a commercial sense, as the firm plans to standardize tunnel-boring devices across projects. “Building a new tunnel-boring machine for a specific project every time adds complexity and cost,” explains Mooney. Finally, Amberg mentions that there is a plethora of existing tunnels around the world, now aging, that require maintenance and repair—many are in her own country of Switzerland. New technologies are required to do this work efficiently. Among those targeting such markets is hyperTunnel. Lane-Nott says his firm’s bots will be able to whoosh down pipes to service the exterior structure of underground tunnels without operators having to put a halt to the road or rail traffic inside. And this revolution is already starting. Network Rail, which owns and operates much of Great Britain’s rail network, has engaged hyperTunnel on a project in this vein, Lane-Nott adds. It’s a small step toward that vision of thousands of robots working in harmony to create vast underground structures—what he calls “the power of the swarm.”
Swarms or otherwise, our future is full of tunnels. The race is on to find out who is going to dig them, and how. More Great WIRED Stories

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Elon Musk revealed a new use for Dogecoin — paying for rides at the Boring Company, which operates a network of underground tunnels in Las Vegas. 
The post Dogecoin utility expands with ‘Teslas in Tunnels’ from the Boring Company appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Dogecoin utility expands with ‘Teslas in Tunnels’ from the Boring Company

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Elon Musk revealed a new use for Dogecoin — paying for rides at the Boring Company, which operates a network of underground tunnels in Las Vegas. The meme coin is often accused of lacking utility, a point refuted by the newly created Dogepedia , which said DOGE “is money” thanks to its low fees and “speed of transactions.”
Recently, the Dogecoin Foundation has gone to great lengths to turn DOGE into a payment token. It said third-party payment integrations with Bitpay and Coinbase, partnering with several prepaid card providers, and developing a “JSON-RPC interface” for shops to integrate with the blockchain directly demonstrate this. Dogecoin does have utility, said Musk
In a video clip posted by @DogeDesigner , the Tesla CEO reaffirmed his support for DOGE because “it has the memes and dogs, and it seems like it has a sense of humor.”
But when challenged on its “potential,” Musk responded by saying its transaction throughput and inflationary tokenomics make it much better than Bitcoin as a payment token. “The actual total transaction capability of Dogecoin is much higher than Bitcoin. And the fact that there’s five billion DOGE created every year is good for using it as a transactional currency.”
The current rate of Dogecoin inflation is about 3.7% a year. It is argued that being inflationary, Dogecoin is ideal for use as a currency, unlike fixed-supply Bitcoin, which some investors hoard for fear of losing gains once spent. Musk has widely publicized that Tesla and SpaceX merch can be bought using Dogecoin. But during the video clip, he also said people could use the meme coin to pay for Boring Company rides in Las Vegas. The Boring Company
Musk founded the Boring Company in 2016, which builds tunnels for “rapid point-to-point transportation” and solves traffic build-up. In June, the company unveiled its first passenger station, located underneath Resorts World Las Vegas . The route is expected to feature 55 such stations along a 29-mile track of underground tunnels. The Boring Company already operates a scaled-down version, which opened in 2021, that consists of two 0.8-mile tracks. The more ambitious “Vegas Loop” will have users riding in Teslas to get to key landmarks across the city, including the Las Vegas Strip, the city’s new football stadium, the Las Vegas Convention Center, and McCarran International Airport. “The system uses human-controlled Model X and Y vehicles to transport passengers”
Dogecoin has been up 4% in the last 24 hours. It remains caught in a sideways pattern established on June 21. Bulls face resistance at $0.07502, having been rejected at this level on July 30. Get an Edge on the Crypto Market ????
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Local Austin news site Austonia reported last week that the Tesla and SpaceX executive was planning on building a new airfield in Bastrop outside of the city, in close proximity to his newly-purchased Boring Company property as well as the Gigafactory site, which he made Tesla's headquarters last year. But Musk took to Twitter to push back on that claim. "Not true," he tweeted in response to an article detailing the news. "Tesla is 5 mins away from Austin International airport. Would be silly to build another private airport, however the existing commercial airport needs another runway, as Austin is growing fast!" A private airport could help him grow his companies' operations, and he would need federal approval as well as the local regulatory go-ahead to build one, Austonia reported. Travel into and out of Austin is already serviced by both Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the 585-acre Austin Executive Airport to the north, which is close to Tesla's Giga Texas on Tesla Road. Google/Insider
And his company SpaceX has set up shop in Boca Chica, Texas, close to the state's border with Mexico.

Elon Musk denies report that he's planning to build his own private airport outside Austin, Texas

Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) provides transit services and agency information to public and transit customers. It is based in Los Angeles, California.

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Elon Musk looks to ease concerns in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles where The Boring Company plans to build a new test tunnel

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The Boring Company is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company that was founded by Elon Musk. It was founded in 2016 and is based in Pflugerville, Texas.

Name	Work History	Title	Status
Elon Musk	PayPal	Founder	Current
Jason Wylanski		Chief Executive Officer	Current
Arun Prakash	Cerebri AI, Virgo Capital, The Boston Consulting Group, and Boeing	Chief Financial Officer	Current
Eric Baumgardt	UGS, Honeywell Process Solutions, and Siemens	Chief Financial Officer	Former

Name	Elon Musk	Jason Wylanski	Arun Prakash	Eric Baumgardt
Work History	PayPal		Cerebri AI, Virgo Capital, The Boston Consulting Group, and Boeing	UGS, Honeywell Process Solutions, and Siemens
Title	Founder	Chief Executive Officer	Chief Financial Officer	Chief Financial Officer
Status	Current	Current	Current	Former

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