Apart from those sections, there were four tunnels running off in four opposite directions. One tunnel from the central area, the eastern tunnel, led to the cooling plant that was responsible for maintaining optimum temperature for maximum efficiency of the system. The cooling plant used a combination of technologies to maintain the temperature levels. The system used a ‘hot water cooling’ technique wherein the heat generated by the system was absorbed by water and that heated water was sent to two different channels. One channel took a part of the heated water through micro-channels to various parts of the project site to heat the facility in winters, and, once the water had lost its heat to the climate, it was pushed back to the cooling plant. The other channel took the rest of the water to an absorption chiller that produced cold water that was sent to the cooling plant through a separate channel. However, as a back-up, the system had a chiller plant as well that used compressed air to maintain the temperature. That tunnel leading to the cooling plant was the shortest tunnel with a length of merely 500 meters.
The longest tunnel at that level was the one running off to the power sub-station, which was the western tunnel. That sub-station was linked to the site’s own power generation unit that was located about thirty miles away and supplied power to the site through hidden cables. There were two other power providers to the site, a wind farm in Ohio and a solar power plant in Kentucky. All the three were to provide power only to the MAXIMUS site. Then, the plant also had Back-up generators and fuel tanks, which were powerful enough to keep the site running for a month without any supply. All the three power generation units were off the national grid and were not connected to any
