LH's faster schedule for Samsung's Yongin chip site depends on 2 million truck trips

Two million dump-truck trips, squeezed into the roughly 400 days between an October start and a November 2027 finish, come to about 5,000 trips a day ^[4]. That count covers only the soil moving from the first section into the neighboring second one ^[6]. Clearing the soil matters more than blasting speed. According to the report, even if the mountain is cut quickly, follow-up work stalls if the soil cannot be removed on schedule ^[7].

LH puts the first section's estimated construction cost at 1.086 trillion won ^[4]. That is about 315,000 won per square meter ^[3], for roughly 44% of the 7.78 million square meter site ^[2]. It is an estimate, and the Daewoo E&C consortium does not sign until mid-October ^[3]. The report does not give a cost for the remaining 4.33 million square meters ^[6]. At the first section's rate the whole site would come to about 2.45 trillion won ^[5], and that figure holds only if the rest of the ground costs as much per meter to move.

LH is also overlapping steps that normally run one after another. Cultural heritage surveys start on each section once logging is finished, while compensation, permits and construction tendering proceed in parallel ^[9]. "To build the national semiconductor industrial complex early, which is a national task, we are breaking away from existing work practices and aggressively pursuing norm-breaking innovation, such as boldly running sequential procedures in parallel, adding momentum to the project," LH President Lee Sung-hoon said ^[11].

The consortium's plan is built for volume. It calls for terraced cuts from the summit down, blasting at 13 locations at once, and larger rock drills and taller blasting benches so each round moves more rock ^[8]. It also adds soil-hauling routes, which had been concentrated in one place, to ease the spots where vehicles pile up ^[8].

This can go three ways. In the first, the added routes keep trucks moving and the gain of about 13 months holds ^[1]. In the second, blasting outruns hauling, rock piles up, and the finish drifts back toward the original end-2028 ^[2]. In the third, a parallel process stops a section. That could be a heritage find on logged ground, or trouble in the 56% of private land secured through filings for expropriation rulings (43% was bought by negotiation) ^[10].

I'd expect any slip to come from the trucks. The consortium's blasting changes raise output per round, but the number of haul trips is set by how much earth has to move ^[6][8]. The counter-case is that the new haul routes target that exact bottleneck ^[8]. A sustained rate near 5,000 trips a day in the first months of work would show the date is safe and this view wrong ^[4].