Comments by "Grenade Tennis" (@hughjass1044) on "Ask Peter: Will the Russians Create A Great Northern Sea Route?" video.

Russia's Arctic route will be at best, an alternate for summer use only.
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Yup. The Arctic route is at best, an alternate for summer only in case of closures on primary routes for whatever reason. There is no one there and thus no reason for any commercial ships to be there. Our NW Passage here in Canada is largely the same but at least it's quite a bit shorter and our Arctic is a little more developed.
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@goenzoy712 Water's not deep enough, no infrastructure on site, no all weather roads connecting it and only a very rudimentary railroad. I'm in Canada, western Canada to be precise, and Churchill comes up a lot and it would be great if it were an option but it's just not. Great location but it's just not near to anyone or anything which matters.
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@goenzoy712 No. As I told you, the subject comes up every few years and it always gets dropped because everyone realizes it wouldn't even begin to come close to being worth the cost. The bigger issue is that it's simply not needed. Canada doesn't need a northern port. We have plenty of perfectly adequate ports on both the east and west coasts (and the Great Lakes as well) so another one on Hudson's Bay would be a hideously expensive redundancy which no one would have any reason to use. The NW Passage may become a useful secondary transit route between oceans someday but it'll never be a route by which anything comes to or goes from our own country because it's hundreds of miles from where the people and the freight is. The only possible rationale for constructing new port facilities anywhere would be if you feared you might get shut out of existing ones and there were very few other available options and that's never going to happen. There have been feasibility studies done on constructing / expanding facilities right on the coasts and every one of them has come back as a hard pass.
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