SUMMARY:Seven months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and its power grid, the entire island lost power on Wednesday -- the biggest outage since September. As crews keep working to restore power to the full island, residents are raising questions once again about the adequacy of those efforts. Amna Nawaz gets an update from special correspondent Monica Villamizar.
Amna Nawaz (NewsHour): So, you have been reporting on this painfully slow pace of recovery ever since Hurricane Maria hit.
But this doesn’t seem to be related to Maria anymore. Everyone’s wondering, how does this keep happening?
Monica Villamizar, special correspondent: Yes, absolutely. That’s a great question.
Many people — Puerto Ricans right now are being out to sort of be patient and understand, at least by PREPA the power utility company — that keep on asking everybody, be patient and understand that generating electricity and distributing it to everybody is very difficult, and our infrastructure was absolutely decimated by Maria.
But if you stop think, Puerto Ricans are saying, how can we be patient after not having electricity for months on end? Many people still today do not have power.
Amna Nawaz: Right.
Monica Villamizar: And how can it be so complicated?
The truth of the matter is, in all fairness, it is complicated. And the grades is — was very poorly [badly] damaged, but it was also in very bad conditions.
They have a massive transmission problem right now, which means it’s really fragile and unstable. So, if you will, you knock down a power — like you say, how can that throw the whole island into darkness? That’s not normal, normally what happens in other countries.
In Puerto Rico, it’s happening because the system that was put in place and the power grid is so obsolete, that this is the situation they have.
Amna Nawaz:So, it was a bad problem decimated and made worse by this Category 5 storm seven months ago.
So, who owns the problem? Who actually has responsibility to try to fix it now?
Monica Villamizar: That’s a great question. And that’s sort of what we have been seeing, a political blame-game.
So, the power utility company blames FEMA. FEMA blames the Corps of Engineers. Puerto Ricans blame the Trump administration. Everybody is going to blame everybody. But in the end, the island is bankrupt. There is no money.
And to fix this enormous problem is going to take billions and billions of dollars that the island does not have. So they’re facing a very serious situation, which is fixing a massive problem, fixing it soon, because, remember, hurricane season is going to start again.
Amna Nawaz: Right.
Monica Villamizar: And in the meantime, all these local authorities and politicians throwing blame around.
In the end, everybody is to blame in a way. But what they have to do and what a lot of people are telling me now is that they want to look to local authorities and pass that to sort of try to own the situation, as you say, and make something better for the island, really, try to construct the future themselves.
Amna Nawaz: And what about people on the ground? What are they telling you now? How do they feel after all this time and where they still are today?
Monica Villamizar:Well, so, most people at the beginning, when we first reported in Puerto Rico, and the generalized feeling was, we are American citizens and we are being treated as secondhand citizens by the company administrations effectively, because the response to our hurricane wasn’t the same as we saw in Florida or Texas, for instance.
And there was no sense of urgency. But we were here dying and hungry and being affected.
It’s sort of slightly shifted now, and I think they’re looking to their local authorities, to Governor Rossello, to Mayor Carmen Yulin, et cetera, like, what are you going to do to fix our problems?
Because, you know what, in the end, they say they don’t have education because of all this debt restructuring and the consolidations of schools, et cetera. They don’t have education, they don’t have power, and they don’t have health.
So when a government is not providing that, it’s somewhat failing in its role. And that’s when people are really going to start asking more of their local authorities and local leaders, because they really need solutions to urgent problems.
And the situation they’re facing right now is, we stay here and make things better, or we have to leave to the mainland.
SUMMARY:It’s been just over six months since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and roughly 150,000 people still do not have power. A string of grassroots efforts aims to jumpstart the grid with solar energy. Science producer Nsikan Akpan explains what they’ll need to see the light.
SUMMARY: Limitless power with virtually no greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. If that sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. For decades, researchers have looked for ways to control, confine and sustain fusion as an energy source. But there has been a lot of progress on a small scale, building on years of physics understanding and progress. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The hunt to create fusion energy. While many people remain worried about pursuing further development of nuclear power, some researchers believe nuclear fusion could hold the key to clean and plentiful energy.
There have been many false starts before, but some scientists see real reason for hope that this path will eventually pay off.
Miles O'Brien has a report for our weekly segment 'The Leading Edge,' a co-production in this case with NOVA and his special, “The Nuclear Option.”
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): In Southern California, this complex, power-hungry machine is hard at work on a seemingly quixotic mission, akin to catching lightning in a bottle. It is a plasma generator. Its builders hope it's a key step in the long journey to the Holy Grail of energy production, fusion.
MICHL BINDERBAUER, Tri Alpha Energy:Fusion is nature's preferred way of making power.
MILES O'BRIEN: Michl Binderbauer is chief technology officer for a startup called Tri Alpha Energy that is making a $500 million bet on fusion.
MICHL BINDERBAUER:Think of this like a mini-sun, a very hot mini-sun, and it radiates. And it's that radiation that is intercepted on the surface of the machine, and then it becomes heat, and then you can process that into electricity.
MILES O'BRIEN:The promise, no less than limitless power, with virtually no greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. If that sounds too good to be true, it is. No one knows that better than nuclear engineer Steve Dean.
STEVE DEAN, Fusion Power Associates: Fusion is not low-tech. It's not going to be easy to prove that it's reliable, maintainable, cost-effective, because it is complicated.
MILES O'BRIEN: Dean is president of Fusion Power Associates, a foundation focused on research and education. He joined the fusion industry in 1962, working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which coordinated and funded the U.S. fusion effort.
STEVE DEAN: To me, it seemed like it was something I could spend my career on, and we would have electricity on the grid by the time I retired.
(LAUGHTER)
STEVE DEAN: That's what I thought. So, it didn't happen that way.
MILES O'BRIEN:Fusion is as old as the cosmos. It is the nuclear reaction that takes place in our sun and all the other stars in the universe. In a fusion reaction, hydrogen atoms collide at high speed, fusing together, forming a helium atom, releasing one neutron.
Since the mass of the helium atom is less than the combined mass of the two atoms that collided in the first place, energy is released.
The dawn of man-made fusion broke over the Pacific in 1952, with the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
MICHL BINDERBAUER: The hydrogen bomb was a quick success. And so a derivative of that was euphoria. In a few more years, we could do civilian energy production out of fusion. And while there were glimmers of hope along the way, we all now know, painfully, that hasn't happened.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now, just how vulnerable is the United States’ electrical power grid? It’s a question getting new attention, after The Wall Street Journal published a detailed account of an organized sniper attack on an electrical substation near San Jose, California, last April.
Shortly before 1:00 a.m., someone cut telephone cables near the substation. About a half-hour later, multiple gunmen quickly fired dozens of shots at 17 transformers inside the perimeter of the station. Fifteen minutes later, transformers began to fail.
But officials managed to avoid serious disruptions by rerouting power. The shooters escaped before police arrived, and they have not been caught. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time of the attack, Jon Wellinghoff, has described it as the most serious domestic terror attack on the grid.
Yesterday, I recorded a two-part conversation about this incident, starting with Wellinghoff.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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