Japan Construction Company Pitches $26 Billion Underwater Housing Units

[Buster's Uncle]

Japan Construction Company Pitches $26 Billion Underwater Housing Units
The Wall Street Journal
By Jun Hongo  6:57 pm JST Nov 19, 2014



—Shimizu Corporation



Japanese construction company Obayashi Corp.1802.TO +2.40% in 2012 announced a plan to create an extremely long elevator by 2050 that would carry travelers from earth straight to outer space.

The company’s rival, Shimizu Corp.1803.TO +2.90%, on Tuesday revealed a grandiose idea of its own, but one that would take mankind in the exact opposite direction.

“This is just a blueprint by our company, but we are aiming to develop the technology that would enable us to build an underwater living space,” Shimizu spokesman Masataka Noguchi said of his company’s Ocean Spiral project. The underwater buildings would each host about 5,000 people and include research centers for excavating the seabed for energy resources, the company said.

According to Shimizu Corp., its Ocean Spirals would include a spherical structure with a diameter of about 500 meters floating near the water’s surface. It will have a spiral path underneath that will connect it to the excavation research center on the ocean bed, approximately 3 to 4 kilometers below. The spiral path would be about 15 kilometers long, they said.

Humans will live inside the 500 meter pod, and the spiral paths, which would carry resources from deeper down, would also guard the Ocean Spirals from being influenced by strong currents, Mr. Noguchi said. The design for the buildings was determined jointly with researchers from University of Tokyo, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the government’s Fisheries Research Agency.

Shimizu Corp. said that Ocean Spirals will use temperature differences in ocean water to create energy and produce desalinated water using hydraulic pressure. Fish farms would be built around the structure, the company said.

“The ocean has an infinite amount of possibilities” and the Ocean Spiral could help mankind put them to practical use, Shimizu said.

While the construction giant has doesn’t have schedule for when it will actually build the Ocean Spiral at this point, it said that research aimed at building one should help them develop new technologies.

The company said it would probably require about ¥3 trillion ($26 billion) to build an Ocean Spiral and take about 5 years once the know-how is available.


http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/11/19/japan-construction-company-pitches-26-billion-underwater-housing-units/?mod=yahoo_hs