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Technology Stocks : Y2k Why the stock-market will collapse within days/week -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Strauss who wrote (120)	5/21/1998 4:27:00 PM
From: Henry Volquardsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 185

Re power grids. After reading some of the posts here and Yaredini's (sp?) site I called a friend who is a troubleshooter at a western power plant and asked him about Y2K issues. Long story short, he agreed that the embedded chips are a big issue particularly for nukes. He has been concerned about the issue as well and pursuing it as well. The contingency plan might be as severe as taking all the nukes off line. Now as severe as this sounds it is survivable. The non nukes have some of the imbedded chip problem but almost all of the have back ups that all manual operation. As he put it this means the plants will still produce at the same level but he won't see his family for several months. What this means for the North American power grid is that if the nukes have to be taken off line it will reduce power availability by 15 to 20%. Nationally we can operate at this level for several months particularly since it will occur during the winter. The only hitch in this scenario is making sure the coal and diesel powered plants have enough fuel. The risk here is that if the rail network goes down getting coal to plants that are not located near mines. They generally carry 30 to 60 days fuel on site so they should be ok. Henry