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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?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)

    by Hartree (195) on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:39PM (#567849)

    There's a lot of misinformation in the comments and the original article is pretty breathless in the scenario it paints.

    EMP "proof" isn't warranted and may not even really be possible. When Mother Nature gets into a real hissy fit, the energy involved is so great that humans just have to get out of the way. That said, there are a lot of things that can be done to make any reasonably expected event much less of an impact.

    If you put resistances connected to ground in the high voltage transformers for long distance transmission lines, it greatly improves the size of storm they can survive without even shutting down. It shorts out common mode currents induced on the long distance lines that would overload the transformer at some part of the 60 Hz waveform (or 50 Hz for Europe) causing them to fail even though the average induced voltage is within their limits. Some of the modern transformers already have this. I'm not enough of a power transmission guru to know how difficult a retrofit this is on existing transformers. Even in that case, the cost is far less than the cost of the grid as some have posted. Many of our systems are already fairly EMP resistant since we design them to take lightning strikes which, though localized are of higher intensity than a geomagnetic storm or a Nuclear EMP. Airplanes, for example, will mostly be fine as pilots are trained in what to do when communications and navigation are out and the metal fuselage of most aircraft is effectively a Faraday cage. The plane will keep on flying. We have lightning strikes on airplanes pretty commonly and it doesn't take them down. Can you have problems? Sure. With little communications and navigation you can have ground collisions, poor approaches that lead to a crash, etc. etc. But most aircraft will be fine. Most automobiles will also be fine. They occasionally get struck by lightning and often keep running even with such a massive jolt and localized EMP. Again, the key is that the chassis and body is a Faraday cage and the internal systems are made to deal with a lot of electrical noise from the ignition system which means they are more resistant to even a big signal.

    Secondly, we have sun observing satellites that gives us a warning before even the strongest events can reach earth. They're monitored by the network controllers and even with a fairly short warning, there is a lot that can be done to minimize damage. In the case of passenger aircraft, general calls by the various air traffic centers that tell the pilots to expect loss of communications and navigation will help greatly even with just a few minutes notice. EMP from a nuke is harder to warn about, but is also not a worldwide effect or as long lived as a Carrington event.

    Much of the danger is policy rather than directly physics, because the minor fixes that would help aren't mandated (as mentioned in the original article), and because power providers are loath to shed load (shut down the systems). In some cases emergency shutdowns of a complex grid take a very long time to bring back up. The disruptions will be large, but not catastrophic

    If there is a national policy that in the event of a Carrington class event, there's someone in authority to order a shutdown the power grid before the CME can arrive and keep it down until the worst of the storm subsides you can get through with pretty minor damage to the grid. But, you have to plan for it, and planning ahead is one thing H. Sapiens tends to put off too long.

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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:10PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:10PM (#567943) Homepage Journal

    So to prevent civilization-level catastrophe, all we need to do in advance is see to it that there is an adequate supply of spare transformers?