The Underappreciated Risks of Severe Space Weather 361
circletimessquare notes a New Scientist piece calling attention to a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, which attempts to raise awareness of the dangers of severe solar electromagnetic storms. "In 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington noticed 'two patches of intensely bright and white light' near some sunspots. At the same time, Victorian era magnetometers went off the charts, stunning auroras were being viewed at the equator, and telegraph networks were disrupted — sparks flew from terminals and ignited telegraph paper on fire. It became known as the Carrington event, and the National Academy of Sciences worries about the impact of another such event today and the lack of awareness among officials. It would induce un-designed-for voltages in all high-voltage, long-distance power lines, and destroy transformers, as Quebec learned in 1989. Without electricity, water would stop flowing from the tap, gasoline would stop being pumped, and health care would cease after the emergency generators gave up the ghost after 72 hours. Replacing all of the transformers would take months, if not years. The paradox would be that underdeveloped countries would fare better than developed ones. Our only warning system is a satellite called the Advanced Composition Explorer, in solar orbit between the Sun and the Earth. It is 11 years old and past its planned lifespan. It might give us as much as 15 minutes of warning, and transformers might be able to be disconnected in time. But currently no country has such a contingency plan."
Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:0, Insightful)
The Big Power Cuts (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in the countryside. Well, more the suburbs now. Since time immemorial people in rural areas have had to deal with power cuts and blackouts, sometimes lasting days.
Amazingly, the vast majority survived.
Candles, flashlamps, tinned food and a fireplace get you through most of the time. Bedtime usually comes earlier. Yes you can't play video games or listen to your mp3s, but there are book, or at worst other people with which you can occupy your time.
As much as the thought of millions of pampered city dwellers wailing helplessly in the darkness might amuse me, I can not imagine that their lives are so different to country people as to make survival a difficult prospect. Yes, it could take days for the power to come back. But people will make it. Business will make it. Society and civilization as we know it, will probably make it.
Yes. I know that sci-fi-esque stories using words like "electromagnetic", "storm" and "disaster" might worry those with active imaginations. I know that newspapers love to print them next to their ad pages. Someday, someone might even make a Hollywood movie about just such a tale, and then people will really start talking about it. But people must always try to remember that just because someone says something, that doesn't mean they are correct.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:4, Insightful)
As useless as your post was, that was exactly my thought. We don't spend much time worrying about asteroid impacts, either, even though those have a greater potential for harm. There's just not enough that we can do about it.
Same thing goes for local supernovae or gamma ray bursts. We could also be living in a false vacuum. At any moment all life on Earth could be wiped out entirely; If broken transformers are all we have to worry about from solar flares, I for one am not going to lose much sleep over it.
Re:The Big Power Cuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it could take days for the power to come back
Try months or years if the event is large enough to destroy transformers on a region or nationwide scale.
Re:Another good reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight.
You're suggesting that because a freak event may or may not happen in someone's lifetime that they should consider living a life that they personally found miserable, so that they could point and say "Hah! I told you so!" for a few days before everyone gets power back and start playing on their XBox's in their nice warm heated houses again?
I'm not convinced it's worth drastically altering your life away from what you know and enjoy for something that may or may not ever actually happen and when it does would realistically just inconvenience you for a short period of time before getting back to normal (it wouldn't be as bad as the summary/article suggests anymore than we'd be getting blown up by terrorists daily if we listened to the Bush/British governments).
The article cites Quebec in 1989 as an example, yet today Quebec doesn't seem to be the desolate Fallout style wasteland where everyone is fending for themselves and millions die that the article infers might happen.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that an event that happened 150 years ago seems more likely to occur again in the near future than an event which happened 65 million years ago, or an event that hasn't happened since the formation of our solar system.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a question of the odds. A major electrical storm occurred within the last couple of centuries. A major asteroid impact - of the sort that would do worse damage to a wide area (not just knock down some trees in Russia) - haven't seen one probably since we dropped down from the trees.
Whether you're losing sleep over it is one thing. whether we, when awake in the daytime, should be hardening our electrical grid against surges from space - well, that's a real question. Prudence doesn't mean just acting when you get scared enough that you can't sleep at night.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't think loss of the entire power grid would deeply affect your life, I have to wonder where you live (and that's being kind)
Re:The Big Power Cuts (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as the thought of millions of pampered city dwellers wailing helplessly in the darkness might amuse me, I can not imagine that their lives are so different to country people as to make survival a difficult prospect.
There are a number of potential problems that us pampered city dwellers have to deal with in the case of an extended power outage that simply aren't as much of a problem in rural areas, such as:
1. Traffic lights being shut down, which can grind traffic and thus commerce to a halt.
2. Crime.
3. Panicking people who don't have the sense to just wait it out.
And of course, most everyone who works in technical jobs is out of work until the power comes back on.
Re:Doomsday situation (Score:5, Insightful)
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such.
What part of 12 months to build them is so hard to understand? Even if that timescale could be shortened do you think the infrastructure exists to produce large numbers of these items in a short period of time? Yes the situation would eventually right itself through economic and other factors. Yes the human race would survive. But you'd still have hundreds of millions of people without power and the benefits of modern civilization for months. Almost every single piece of technology that supports civilization (particularly high population density civilization) depends on the electrical grid
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
It has [nasa.gov] come to pass in the past. Within the last 200 years as a matter of fact. If a similiar event happened today (the whole point of the article that you apparently refuse to read) it would wreck havoc with modern infrastructure. In 1859 all that existed to disrupt were telegraph networks. Today our entire civilization depends on infrastructure that is vulnerable.
Sticking your head in the sand and refusing to even read the article might be typical /. behavior but all it accomplishes in the end is to confirm your ignorance.
Significant problem, amazingly poor article. (Score:4, Insightful)
I really expect more from these guys.
That the power grid in this country would become a set of large antennas during a "carrington event" is an interesting problem. Inducted current would be tremendous. There would be fires, almost certainly, and blown transformers. Fusable links might help with the transformer issue, but I'm sure that some significant amount of transformer capability would be taken offline. Power stations would likely be immune from meltdown, but I don't know if standard trips would keep them all whole. Let's say that some 50% of the generating capacity (very generous), and 70% of the transformers (possibly low), were taken out by this event. A significant inconvenience, to be sure. Nothing that we, as individuals -- and as a society, could not handle. To assume, like the authors of this article, that the most powerful country in the world would simply roll-over is preposterous.
To propose, seriously, that "Modern Healthcare" would end in 72 hours when the emergency generators ran out of fuel -- this is ridiculous. The article's premise that modern civilization in our country would be thrown back to "third world" conditions is also completely without merit. Not to belittle the situation -- it would, in a word, suck. That said, we would rise to the occasion, I am sure of it.
Let's just, for a moment, reflect on how deep the fuel infrastructure is in this country. A power grid is not required for fuel distribution, though some level of power is required. Pumps that pump diesel can be run by generators, many refineries are capable of using their own product to generate power, and distribution of fuel to Hospitals and the like is a standard emergency procedure. Trains, tanker trucks, and ships continue to run. The transportation infrastructure would remain largely intact beyond the boundaries of very large metropolitan areas. The roads would continue to roll, and with it, teams of people working to fix the problem.
First, the plants, then the substations, then the cities and transmission lines. Would it be hard? Of course it would be hard. But we would continue to make it work, to adapt and overcome, and in the process make it better.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:2, Insightful)
Asteroid impacts happen quite frequently, actually. Most of them are small. We have quite a bit of data on the frequency of large-scale asteroid impacts, and they have contributed several times to mass extinctions.
We have one (1) data point for solar flares of this magnitude. We cannot make *any* meaningful statements about frequency.
Re:Another good reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having almost been one of those wacky survivalists (mostly interested in turning my property into a self-sustaining system), it's damned hard.
First, if you aren't willing to give up all your modern conveniences
Isn't the point of small 's' survivalism (as opposed to Survivalism) to have the ability to survive without those conveniences, not necessarily to go without them entirely?
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if government will ever take any precautions.
They didn't about the financial crisis.
The tenets of preparedness (Score:5, Insightful)
"Wacky survivalists" is an historically very recent notion. For the bulk of mankind's history, having a well stocked larder-stores adequate to get you through to the next harvest season- and the means to supply yourself with adequate shelter and heat and water, etc based on your own and mostly local sources was quite the ordinary norm. It has only been the last two or three generations where that started to fall out of favor.
We have had numerous examples of much smaller and more localized infrastructure destruction, and the best observations have shown that areas start to suffer fast after a three day outage of general modern technology. Just in time delivery systems and centralized power and water and natgas delivery and so on are the main cause of that.without massive outside the region resupply, that's it, civilization falls apart rapidly. Three days isn't very long. If the event/disaster is much longer than three days, and no outside help is coming in (because the next region over is just as bad off, as the region next to that, etc), you'd see some pretty dire circumstances arise.
Here is one example for the US, we no longer maintain a national emergency bulk food stockpile. It used to be millions of bushels of this or that, dried milk and so on. We maintained that for decades, then they stopped and went to what is called set aside. This is due to farming changes and "the market". We- the government "we"- used to pay minimal price controls and stockpile various surplus foods, in order to maintain our domestic agricultural base through wild market swings and seasonal weather variations, but they more or less stopped that some time ago and now we have no stockpiled food, they sold the last of it off earlier last year finally.
In other words, on a very large scale, we have no backup civilization or big national pantry. It doesn't exist, just not there. The government has zero provisions to help the people in general at any national scale sized event. They have provisions to use military force to "stay in charge", they call it "maintaining continuity of government", that's it. We have a national petroleum reserve as the only exception, and it is in the form of just crude, it would still need refining and delivery-that's iffy enough in such a scenario to even be possible- (and even then most would go to the government and not the people).
On the other hand, there is nothing stopping people from instituting their own stores and provisions and having a personal backup protection scheme, the "wacky survivalists" type method that all our ancestors considered normal and a very good idea. In the community we still call it survivalism, but it has a less scary name now too, "practical preparedness". Here is a plain vanilla example, for roughly the same cash people put into a big screen plasma TV they can have a decent amount of long term dried stored food. For what a cheap laptop or other "must have" electronic gadget of the month costs, you can have a pretty decent gravity powered water filter. The folks in suburbia and in the hinterland get laughed at a lot as having unsustainable lifestyles, but they are living in the only places where you can have a rationally large enough local garden and access to alternative water supplies, etc, along with firewood. Choices one can choose now in other words. All the big cities would collapse rapidly in such a national sized electronic disaster as in TFA, it would become beyond ugly, right up to and including cannibalism.
Basically, the government sucks when it comes to national and practical "civil defense". They only have a military solution. The military doesn't produce anything, it just takes it/spends it/wears it out. Look at the recent articles about the relatively small numbers of homeless in California, possibly our richest state. They can't even deal with such a teeny tiny homeless situation at very low numbers adequately. Extrapolate those numbers from thousands to tens of millions or more and it becomes easy to see the problems...
So it is up to the individual now to decide to incorporate a practical preparedness plan and alter lifestyle a little bit, the article scenario is only one of many potential wildcards that could occur.
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, worst case is it happens during the middle of a heat wave and tens of thousands die in the big cities because they have no air conditioning, no water and no means of leaving the city.
i don't understand the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
all of the naysayers seem to point out examples that mean absolutely nothing about what we are talking about here
1. "i live in a rural area, everything will be fine"
actually yes, you are right, i agree rural areas will be totally fine. now: tell us about major urban centers, with population densities intrinsically dependent upon regular power, that would experience serious problems
2. "we had a power outage, it wasn't that bad"
yeah: it lasted a few days. we're talking MONTHS here
3. "i come from a place with regular places intermittent power outages, we did ok"
yeah, and life adapts when thats the status quo. we are talking about a highly electricty dependent society, that has had regular pwoer for decades, suddenly without power FOR MONTHS
4. "you can get the transformers up quick, you can cannibalize 2 or 3 and get one working ok"
all the transformers would be destroyed in exactly the same way. there is no backup supply on hand, adequate supply and distribution and installation would take weeks, months
its not the lack of power that is the issue. the issue is the suddenness, the long time period, and the effect on high density areas that have grown accustomed to reliable electrity. so a lot of the naysayers here don't seem to attack the real issue here, and teach us nothing, not a damn thing, about what it would be like for that society which has depended upon regular power for decades, to suddenly not have it at all
and then there is the idea this is all some sort of hollywood movie driven hysterical fearmongering. what? no one is pissing in their pants. its a valid concern, and the fix is not very difficult, and people are talking about it calmly. we cant' do that without being accused of screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" really?
its worth discussing rationally and doing something about it? we have to do nothing about this problem because you think this is false alarmism? well, false alarmism is a real problem in this world. so is a false sense of complacency. it depends upon the nature of the problem. here we are talking about an issue which is relatively easy to fix, a valid long term concern, compared to threats like religious extremism or an asteroid the size of a football field. so why not discuss it rationally and go fix it?
Scrounging parts? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're assuming that they're going to fail in random ways. What's being described is that every one of them fails in exactly the same way -- which means you can't cobble together a single working one from multiple failed ones.
You're right in that things likely won't fail nearly as badly as they make it out to be -- I know the power companies have the ability to do rolling brownouts, as we used to regularly have them when I lived in DC ... it's only a small step to rolling backouts like you describe after that.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals. Other than the medical issues described, it's not going to kill us unless we refuse to adapt. We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
Re:Another good reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
At least until you run out of ammo.
Any self-respecting survivalist/religious extremist/rural dweller/compound leader has the equipment on hand to make his or her own ammo ;)
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:1, Insightful)
I wonder if the government should take precautions. What would "taking precautions" about the financial crisis even mean, other than trying not to cause one in the first place.
The only precautions I'm really in any way comfortable with a government taking are the ones against other governments. i.e. a Navy and a stockpile of weapons and trainers sufficient to build an army in enough time to matter.
Re:The tenets of preparedness (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't even have to spend much money to be properly prepared. You can just start to buy, store and cycle through long term storable food items. Rice, beans, potatoes, dried pasta, canned goods, bottled water, etc. You just buy it in bulk, store it, and use it regularly to keep a fresh mix coming in.
Then when something happens, a bad storm hits, you lose your job, etc, you'll have a nice store of foods piled up you normally eat anyway.
Re:Doomsday situation (Score:1, Insightful)
Why does everyone assume that utilities don't learn lessons from past incidents?
The problem of sunspot induced ground currents has to do with the big transmission level lines that run for hundreds of miles, not in the low voltage distribution lines the come down your street. They are served by hundreds of house-size transmission transformers, not by the millions of pole-top distribution transformers you're familiar with.
The primary fix is to use ungrounded delta-wye transformers so that there is no long-distance earth return path for current. All the utilities I know claim to have made such fixes long ago. On what factual basis should we doubt them?
the idiots are you and whoever modded you up (Score:5, Insightful)
you are clearly ignorant. this is not meant as a throwaway insult, but a qualitative judgment of your words on the subject matter
here's some intellectual charity:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/electromag/java/faraday2/ [fsu.edu]
start there. follow the links. read. educate yourself
THEN comment
the issue here has absolutely nothing to do with static electricty, or small electronics. it has to do with electromagnetic induction across long powerlines
why is it we have to live in a world where the dumbest amongst us are usually also the loudest?
Re:Don't forget the asteroids. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're underestimating things. In my worst case scenario this event destroys the power grid for the entire US during the middle of a record heat wave.
1)No, I don't think they would have means of leaving. First, where would they go? There's no power anywhere. People by and large will stay where they think they are safe until desperation drags them out of their homes. The government will also initially tell people to stay calm and stay in their homes.
2)No, there is not enough busing capacity to deal with a mass exodus of every major city in the US. It would be an impossible undertaking during a normal day. There will not be the capacity for it within days of the power grid being destroyed let alone a week afterward. Where would these people go? There's no place for them.
3)No, cities by and large are not prepared for the grid being destroyed. That was the point of the article. There aren't enough generators warehoused right now to do what you're suggesting. The power grid was just destroyed. In every US city.
Even during optimal times a major heat wave can cause hundreds of deaths in large cities in FIRST world nations. Without air conditioning this will be much worse. Modern buildings are not designed to be occupied without working central air. Without an adequate water supply you will not last 3 days. Third world countries suffer just as much. We just don't hear about it.
Regarding gasoline and generators, in a worst case scenario there will be zero refining because the power grid is dead. I'd like to think they'd be brought back online quickly, but how long do you think it will take to get all of them operational again? Days? Weeks? Gasoline supplies will be extremely tight very quickly.
The local government may be able to bring in a few generators to make water flow for a while, but I don't think they'll be able to sustain that across an entire metropolitan area. We don't have enough generators warehoused to supply one city with enough to provide all the basic services. Every city will need them.
Unless this event lasts long enough to fry the entire hemisphere, diesel will have some limited availability(some amounts of it are brought in pre-refined). So yes, some amounts of trucking will be available.
However, there will be enough bottled water to last days. I doubt there is enough warehoused bottled water in the country right now to keep a single major metro area in drinking water for a week. And we're talking about every single one in the US.
Heat stroke kills. Within days there will be no major medical center left with adequate supplies or generator power. So people that would normally survive a heat stroke will die.
I think you're really underestimating the impact of the destruction of the electrical grid of the US and are willfully ignoring the cascade effect that such an event will have.
I'm merely stating that I think tens of thousands of people will die because of lack of AC and water. I'm not estimating the numbers that will die due to fire, starvation and civil unrest. Those numbers will be much higher.
Don't forget the asteroids (and comets). (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you forgot the event of 1908 in Siberia, which, if it had landed 4 hours later would have taken out St. Petersburg, and the fall of 3000 meteorites in Normandy in 1803, both of which were only a small part of a sequence of cometary near misses that goes back at least to the dendrochronological minimum of 4375 BC. It's really quite amazing we're still here at all:
http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterEight.htm [lordbalto.com]
Re:Another good reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pick up a copy of "Improvised Munitions Handbook" for all of your propellant, explosive, incendiary, and destructive device needs!
It is US Army TM 31-210, circa 1969.(don't know if it still issued/used- I was issued my copy in 1977)
You can find a copy online at cryptome [cryptome.info] in both html(4.2 MB) and pdf(4.4 MB) zipped files.
From the book:
This work is in the public domain. The original work was created by U.S. Federal Government employees in their official capacity. Therefore by United States Code, title 17, section 105, it is not subject to copyright.
BIG DISCLAIMER!!!! :Most of the 'recipes' in this manual are Extremely Dangerous to actually make and use. I heartily do not recommend trying these.
Intended for educational/entertainment use only.