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"The Florence tunnel boring machine brought in by the federal government owned Snowy Hydro to create the head race tunnel for the troubled Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, remains stuck in hard rock nearly a month after coming to a halt.

The company revealed on Wednesday that the high pressure jets brought in to try and blast the rock away are “working well”, but gave no indication of when the machine would be able to resume operations.The controversial and incident riddled project has been hit by lengthy delays and massive cost overruns, and according to some analysts each additional day of delay costs an additional $3 million a day in interest.

Snowy Hydro CEO Dennis Barnes appeared before a Senate Committee last month shortly after the latest mishap, but indicated at the time that there had been no additional blow out in costs, already at $12 billion without counting the cost of new transmission lines.It is estimated that the problems with Florence, which reportedly cost more than $150 million, have contributed around $2 billion to those added costs.

Florence encountered its first problems soon after starting in early 2022, and suffered delays totalling more than a year after being bogged in soft ground. It came to its latest halt on May 16 this year when it encountered extremely hard and abrasive rock conditions."