Electric mountain: the power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

Utilitarian as they may be, some civic projects are so monumental they approach the sublime. And one of the most elegant is hidden inside a mountain in WalesI've been fascinated by science and engineering my entire life. The first thing I remember wanting to be when I was a kid was an astronaut - it was the 1970s, the cultural peak of space exploration. By the time I was 10, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, and this took me all the way through to a degree in engineering physics.I was born in Canada, but when I was nine, my family lived in Bhopal, India, in my father's family home, for six months. If culture is everything that you do without thinking about why you're doing it, then our infrastructural systems, and the ways of life they make possible, are unquestionably an important part of culture. Even as a child, the differences between Canada and India - language, social norms, the deep poverty and the unignorable inequality - required serious adjustment. Continue reading...