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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (4921)	3/21/1999 1:18:00 PM
From: Ken	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9818

Re: Do NOT rely on Mill's assessment and predictions, re: the grid. His is a 'stand-alone' prediction. Perhaps, somewhat accurate in itself, but because of the interconnectivity/interdependency factors, and the domino effect, it should be considered a ultra- best-case senario. What happens to the grid when telecom goes down? What happens to the grid when banking is disrupted, and the workers, including emergency repair, can't be paid? What happens to the grid when civil unrest occurs in each locale adjacent to the plants? What happens to the grid when water delivery systems are disrupted, and x number of utility-related personnel have not stored sufficient/any water reserves? What happens to the grid when the food chain is disrupted, and same senario as with water supplies, above? What happens to the grid when gasoline supplies are disrupted, and at least some of the neccesary personnel can't obtain gas to get to work, at any time? What happens to the grid when, with civil unrest occurring, some or manny key personnel choose to remain home to protect their families? What happens to the grid, when heavy transport is so disrupted, that gas and coal is not delivered in sufficent amounts to fire the plants? (in reality, this may not be a factor, as the military/national guard, at least until their own telecom and comm and control system breaks down) ? The permutations are endless. Ken "its too......................!"

To: John Mansfield who wrote (4921)	3/21/1999 4:52:00 PM
From: Howard Clark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

The Mills calculation is based on estimating the number of single points of failure in a power plant, i.e. estimating the probability that the failure of a single embedded component could shut the plant down. I have to admit to complete ignorance of power plant design, so I will ask anyone to comment on the likelyhood that the failure of a single component could result in the loss of operation of an entire plant. In general, the fact of interdependency is often sited by alarmists as exponentially raising the odds of an entire infrastructure collapse. For example given: S1 --> S2 where S1 and S2 are interdependent systems each having a reliability of 90%, the overall reliability of the system is only 81%. One question I have not seen addressed in this forum is whether and the extent to which interdependency is mitigated by redundancy. In the example above, if R1 and R2 are independent systems having the same reliability as S1 and S2, i.e. S1 --> S2 < > R1 --> R2 the overall reliability of the system is 96.39%. (To be truly independent, R1 and R2 must not depend on the same software or firmware as S1 and S2 that may be Y2K non-compliant. In fact R1 and R2 may represent manual procedures that are employed in the failure of automated systems.) As an additional point on the power plant situation, I believe I read somewhere (sorry can't recall the source) that the electricity grid problems will be partly mitigated by the fact that the century rollover occurs in the dead of winter when power consumption is lower than in peak air conditioning season.