[Paywall] America Has a #HotSteel Problem
#Railways, #roads, #PowerLines, #batteries—the heat of #ClimateChange is making them all falter.
By Zoë Schlanger
August 14, 2024
"A basic fact of thermodynamics is coming to haunt every foot of train track in the United States. Heat makes steel expand, moving its molecules farther apart, and as hot days become hotter and more frequent, rail lines are at risk of warping and buckling more often.
"Any fix must deal with this fundamental truth of physics. #Railroads can slow their trains down, which avoids adding more heat. Or they can leave gaps in a rail (or cut them as an emergency measure), which relieves pressure that causes track to bulge but means a potentially bumpier and slower ride. Painting tracks white would help deflect heat, but the paint would need to be reapplied frequently. Adapting to this reality will be expensive, and might ultimately just look as it does now: slow the trains, cut the track, issue a delay.
"Our #infrastructure is simply becoming too hot to function, or at least function well. High heat can also cause bridges to fail, for the same reason as with train tracks. Roads can buckle, thanks to the thermodynamics of concrete and asphalt. In Alaska, where permafrost is thawing into a substrate more akin to a waterbed, roads can resemble an undulating line of ribbon candy. Heat has two effects on #PowerTransmission, and 'both of them are bad,' Bilal Ayyub, a civil-engineering professor at the University of Maryland, told me. One, heat reduces how much electricity power lines can deliver. Two, heat increases demand—everyone turns on their #AirConditioners in unison—further straining an already heat-strained grid, sometimes to its breaking point."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/08/america-infrastructure-climate-change/679458/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Dietmar Bachmann 
: 
willcox