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posted by martyb on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the living-off-the-grid dept.

On March 13th, 1989 a surge of energy from the sun, from a "coronal mass ejection", had a startling impact on Canada. Within 92 seconds, the resulting geomagnetic storm took down Quebec's electricity grid for nine hours. It could have been worse. On July 23rd 2012 particles from a much larger solar ejection blew across the orbital path of Earth, missing it by days. Had it hit America, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have destroyed perhaps a quarter of high-voltage transformers, according to Storm Analysis Consultants in Duluth, Minnesota. Future geomagnetic storms are inevitable.

And that is not the only threat to the grid. A transformer-wrecking electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would be produced by a nuclear bomb, designed to maximise its yield of gamma rays, if detonated high up, be it tethered to a big cluster of weather balloons or carried on a satellite or missile.

[...] After the surge, telecom switches and internet routers are dead. Air-traffic control is down. Within a day, some shoppers in supermarkets turn to looting (many, unable to use credit and debit cards, cannot pay even if they wanted to). After two days, market shelves are bare. On the third day, backup diesel generators begin to sputter out. Though fuel cannot be pumped, siphoning from vehicles, authorised by martial law, keeps most prisons, police stations and hospitals running for another week.

[...] Yet not much is being done. Barack Obama ordered EMP protection for White House systems, but FERC, the utilities regulator, has not required EMP-proofing. Nor has the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pushed for a solution or even included EMP in official planning scenarios. (The Pentagon should handle that, DHS officials say; the Pentagon notes that civilian infrastructure is the DHS's responsibility.) As for exactly what safeguards are or are not needed, the utilities themselves are best equipped to decide, says Brandon Wales, the DHS's head of infrastructure analysis.

But the utilities' industry group, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), argues that, because EMP is a matter of national security, it is the government's job. NERC may anyway be in no rush. It took a decade to devise a vegetation-management plan after, in 2003, an Ohio power line sagged into branches and cut power to 50m north-easterners at a cost of roughly $6bn. NERC has repeatedly and successfully lobbied Congress to prevent legislation that would require EMP-proofing. That is something America, and the world, could one day regret.

Is a widespread blackout the end of the world?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:22PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:22PM (#567752) Journal

    The risks from geomagnetical storms on infrastructure [wikipedia.org] will mainly affect long length transmission lines, especially the aerial ones. This is very unlike atmospheric nuclear EMP [wikipedia.org], the latter will have fast varying components able to fry even small sized electronics.

    In short, this is because the wavelength of such EM phenomena are long - the geomagnetic induced currents "are often described as being quasi direct current (DC), although the variation frequency of GIC is governed by the time variation of the electric field.".
    As such, we'll probably see the main HV transformers blowing out, anything with lengths in the order of 10s of km showing some effects, but I'd be less worried about:

    1. underground cables - the conductors making the circuit are close one to the other, the area intersected by the magnetic flux variation is not that high. Besides, they have a metallic shielding (mechanical resistence and minimising the capacitive loses due to the soil) and, assuming the soil is not very dry, a good part of the magnetic variation will dissipate as eddy currents induced in the soil
    2. the homes cabling (assuming the fuses trip fast enough) - their spatial extent are simply too small to capture enough magnetic field variation
    3. of course, anything electronic - the planes' autopilot and your mobile phone are too small to blow up, but you may lose connection due to the RF noise

    The effects will be more devastating for higher latitudes - Canada and the Scandinavian will feel such an event much stronger than Texas and Mexico.

    Probably the transmission lines themselves will be OK once the transformers will blow up and the circuits open; remember? one of the results of using a transformer is the galvanic isolation of the two segments the transformer connects - overall voltage increase in one segment won;t be felt in the other. This also implies: as long as the current variation in one segment is slow enough (quasi-DC), the other segment won't feel it.

    But... anything radio will go crazy - the long and medium RF wavelengths swallowed by geomagnetic induces currents, the short and microwaves by the increased activity in the ionosphere. GPS signals will be gone, but I reckon the GPS satellites may still be functional (if radiation hardened enough - the alpha particle flux will be yuuuge).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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