Top 5 Power Services Power Plant TypesPower Services' primary responsibility is to generate enough electricity to keep all of Alpha Complex powered and working. (For workers, at least. Executives' primary responsibility is sending up-and-coming rivals to work camps.) That leads to many power plant designs for if (read: when) one type proves faulty because the design is crap. Here are the top five types of power plants currently in use in Alpha Complex.
1) BrightHappyComplex-class Nuclear Reactors: These popular plants turn radioactive material into electricity for all. Is this from fission or fusion? The plant workers have no idea, but neither do the managers. Who wants to teach an Alpha Complex citizen how plutonium can go boom? Still, these remain popular because they don't melt down
that often and because people assigned to reactor shielding duty need a reactor to shield with their bodies.
2) Liquid Hot Magma Reactors: Geothermal energy is popular and plentiful in a giant city carved out of the earth, but in a society where obedience is valued over competency, these tend to focus on magma, which leads to a lot of magma-related fires and explosions. That's why PowerServ's geothermal plants are located next door to prisons and Infrared cafeterias. Also, they are called 'reactors' because people are used to saying 'nuclear reactors' and no one has ever bothered to correct this.
3) Microwave Energy Creator-Transmitters (CTs): An occasionally insane R&D scientist created a method of transmitting electricity wirelessly using microwaves. There were two problems: 1) power still needed to be generated, and 2) it cooked everything and everyone in between the transmitter and the receiver. An often-insane PowerServ exec figured, if microwaves can send energy, then it could generate energy--and he demanded power plants built on his "discovery". Today, dozens of these plants are in use. But they're all just BrightHappyComplex-class nuclear reactors with a giant sticker on the cooling tower that reads, 'Warning! Microwaves in use'.
4) Fan Farms: This is also what happens when you can't say no to leadership "ideas". Wind energy is free & renewable, but there is no wind inside an underground complex. An Indigo citizen's solution? Aim 400 electric fans at a wind turbine and generate electricity that way. Doesn't the energy used by 400 fans outweigh the energy generated by the turbine? Do you want to try explaining that to an Indigo citizen?
5) FriendlyFire-class Incinerators: Even with intensive recycling, Alpha Complex creates a huge amount of trash. PowerServ created their own trash collection system to nab those bags, toss them in a special incinerator and make electricity from the fire. No one exactly knows
how that happens, but juice is flowing. Sometimes, the smoke is vented to the Outdoors. Other times, it's used for crowd control.
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