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Originally Posted by PTTG
Take a look at the book "One Second After" for a well-researched if slightly fatalistic example. Life support without a national power is an inevitable death; sooner or later, you're going to run out of bottled oxygen.
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Only if you don't recover or die before the oxygen runs out - most people on life support are not on it for a really long time.
And frankly, I think the people claiming mass transformer meltdowns are talking nonsense, nor would it take down electricity supplies even if it were true. They are talking about interconnects that route power between sections of the grid, lose them and you chop the grid into lots of smaller pieces, which is means you can't support the former peak loads in high usage areas until you fix them, but it's going to be quite a while until you need too anyway what with all the consumer stuff that isn't working anymore.
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I imagine that Hoover Dam would remain a useful site... after one or two years of concerted repair efforts.
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Um, what mechanism are you imagining for damaging it? An EMP pulse isn't going to do much, and an actual shot at it that breaches the dam isn't going to be anything as minor as a two year repair. Really, it's not the generators that are a problem anywhere, so postulating going to alternate energy sources is rather strange - fossil burning plants are still going to be there or easily repaired, its the distribution network, full of long wires that will double as antennas, that is vulnerable at all, not the primary production.