Top 5 Useless Megaprojects

It's all very meta.

[priitmolder]

Projects that can be titled with "10% cost, 90% administrative fees"

[raymondsmith]

Government: We spent $13 billion to build this srorage site for nuclear waste.
People: No thats dangerous!
Gov: OK what do we do with it?
People: Just put it outside.
Gov: OK
🤦‍♂️

[ninjanoodle]

I would have included some of the following:
1) China's Ghost Cities
2) The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea
3) Dubai Islands of the World
4) The Cincinnati Subway
5) The New South China Mall
6) Viaduct Petrobas in Brazil
7) Soviet Space Center

[RAS_Squints]

Would think America's most epic failed mega project was Afghanistan

[MA]

The greatest disservice done by the environmental movement has been its rejection of nuclear and hydroelectric power.

While not without some thought, it seems to be based more on ideology than on an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages.

[MrJAFy]

Cancelled projects and a disaster are another category than “useless”.

[steveschritz]

To keep things balanced, let’s also talk about the “war on poverty” and “war on drugs.” Billions of dollars spent and things only got worse.

[eliharper]

FINALLY! Someone covered the failed supercollider in Texas. It would be a dream if you were to cover it in better detail at some point. I grew up and live near there in Ellis Co. I drive past some of the old access points all the time and wonder what could have been...

[Sergiblacklist]

the nuclear storage one is quite sad to me because all these protests stopped the push forward of nuclear power which could have been very useful in the current fight for climate change

[StoneInMySandal]

I was still with ORNL when they were doing destructive testing for roadway transport casks for the Yucca Mountain material relocation process. We were doing failure modeling for the casks. It was fun and it resulted in a trip to the Yucca Mountain site.

Far in the future people will find that place and it’ll be the subject of countless videos and podcasts. It’s truly surreal there.

[sketchesofpayne]

With the title "Top 5 Useless Megaprojects" I was expecting a list of projects that were finished and met their design goals, but ended up not being used or were obsolete by the time they were finished. This is a list of canceled projects plus a burst dam.

[CrisMind]

I've actually done some work at the chemical plant that was going to be a super collider. It's pretty cool to see even if it was never completed

[williamdefries]

The great wall of China had a much greater price tag on it than you spoke of, an average of 10 bodies per mile are buried in that wall.

[JimKJeffries]

The saddest part is how a great amount of nuclear waste is being incorrectly stored in individual states, rather than making use of a great facility.

[CatsMeowPaw]

I would add Nordstream-2 to the list. The gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Billions of Euros spent, and it will probably never be used. A really bad idea right from the start, and many people knew it.

[robertojofre]

should had included the first attempt at building the panama canal, by the french at the end of the 1800´s

[pbandj]

Simon....check on the HART on O'ahu. Oroginal cost of $3bn and a rail running from the west side of the island to downtown (Ala Moana). Now, almost 20 years later we are looking at $12bn, the train is still not running and will not go to Ala Moana.

- Train wheels turned out to be the incorrect size
- No one accounted for birds pooping on the rails which will now cost an extra $1m/year
- It seems that because it has taken so long to get the project moving the trains are technologically outdated and the rails are starting to rust.

Oh and the massive graft and corruption that has come a long with it.

And $12bn is the estimate as of TODAY. Every six months or so, it goes up another billion or so.

[johngalt]

How about the California high speed rail boondoggle?

[ignitionfrn]

0:25 - Top 5 - The yucca mountain repository
2:25 - Top 4 - Superconductive supercollider
4:25 - Top 3 - The darien scheme
6:25 - Top 2 - The saint francis dam
8:35 - Top 1 - Donald Trump's proposed wall

[randomobserver]

It really should not be this difficult to secure the Mexican border. Other countries can do such things. Is it just because everyone assumes the wall would have to work by itself, unassisted, or be judged a failure, or is the US just incompetent?