3. The tunnel through the channel
Location: UK and France
Complete Expense: $16.9 Billion*
Year Completed: 1994
In 1802, French mining engineer Albert Mathieu-Favier made the initial proposal to tunnel beneath the English Channel. After 192 years and around $6.9 billion USD (or $16.9 billion in current currency), the Channel Tunnel officially opened for traffic.
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Youtube.com, Documentary Films, and The Channel Tunnel
With funding from the governments of France and Britain, Eurotunnel was the fortunate recipient of the construction contract. The Chunnel is 31.4 miles long and is regarded as one of "the Seven Wonders of the Modern World."
With 23.5 percent of its length under water, the English Channel Tunnel holds the record for being the longest underwater tunnel in the world. Currently, the tunnel is used for the transportation of more than 25% of the products exchanged between the UK and continental Europe. That amounts to yearly goods sent under the English Channel worth more than $170 billion.
4. Dam at Three Gorges
Place: China
Complete Expense: $37.2 billion*
Year Completed: 2006
The Three Gorges Dam was the largest operational hydroelectric dam in the world when it was finished in 2006, three years after it was first built, and as of 2018, it produced twenty times more electricity than the Hoover Dam.
Shutterstock, PRILL and Three Gorges Dam
The sum paid to flood the reservoir that the dam filled was included in the project's total cost. The dam has the capacity to actually slow down the Earth's rotation because it is displacing such a large amount of water.
The area is so vast that it once had 13 cities, 140 towns, thousands of villages, and 1.3 million people—who have since been evacuated and given compensation. The $37.2 billion that the Three Gorges Dam was supposed to cost to develop was already recovered by 2013.
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