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Friday, March 18, 2011

On the Grid

- The power grid is something most of us rarely give much thought to. Right now it is a major topic in Japan following the 9.0 earthquake. It was the failure of the electric power grid coupled with flooding of backup generators by the devastating tsunami that resulted in loss of cooling for the Fukushima nuclear plant. Once the second failsafe - backup batteries were drained there was no way to power the pumps that deliver cooling to the reactors. The gird powers almost everything and while it has been very reliable this complex creation can fail on a very large scale. Next time you look up at those lines and transformers give some thought to modern world they enable. Canon G11, 1/40 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 200 converted to black and white in Silver Efex Pro.

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