Content tagged with "infrastructure"

The Big Dig
Explanation
October 25, 2021
845

“The Big Dig was the largest highway project in American history. It was conceived in 1987, broke ground in 1991, and wasn’t completed until 2007. Costs rose from $2.3 billion to $14.8 billion. When the loan is paid off in 2038, the total cost will have been $24 billion. Four workers died during the…”

Macadam
Explanation
January 4, 2022
166

“A type of road construction. A definition: to construct or finish by compacting into a solid mass a layer of small broken stone on a convex well-drained roadbed and using a binder for the mass In my reading, it appears that this is the type of road where layers of gravel are laid, then compacted by…”

Megawatt
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
June 5, 2022
947

“It’s a lot. But it gets complicated, because energy exists in two dimensions: So, ‘a megawatt’ is an amount of power being delivered at a singular moment. If you deliver that same amount of power for an hour, you have delivered ‘a megawatt hour.’ It’s like driving. Going ‘60 mph’ doesn’t move you…”