How prepared are we for the next giant solar flare?
forbes.com
forbes.com
CME refers to coronal mass ejections[1]. The 1859 Carrington Event is a case where one of these happened[2].
The US power grid is susceptible to some real damage from one of these. It would take a long time to fix.
The US, at least, isn't prepared.
[1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections
And the corollary: After things fall apart, ask for a taxpayer bailout.
The anti-corruption view that has massive support gets none of that and gets nowhere, at least yet.
Corruption is Legal in America: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
If we can’t analyze our own choices as potentially contributing to the system, including not voting (which is more of an endorsement of whatever happens rather than a denial of approval), then we cannot move forward.
As far as "my vote doesn't matter", this is quite silly considering how the last two elections featured electoral votes won by ever thinner margins, and that even at the presidential level with the highest turnout most people don't vote, to say nothing of state local elections, primaries, etc. https://i.redd.it/p0z5srsw7py51.png
All submarine cables laid down in the last 20 years use fiber-optics, which isn't susceptible to solar flares like copper cables are.
Repeaters are powered by a constant direct current passed down the conductor near the centre of the cable, so all repeaters in a cable are in series. Power feed equipment is installed at the terminal stations. Typically both ends share the current generation with one end providing a positive voltage and the other a negative voltage. A virtual earth point exists roughly halfway along the cable under normal operation. The amplifiers or repeaters derive their power from the potential difference across them. The voltage passed down the cable is often anywhere from 3000 to 15,000VDC at a current of up to 1,100mA, with the current increasing with decreasing voltage; the current at 10,000VDC is up to 1,650mA. Hence the total amount of power sent into the cable is often up to 16.5kW.So, contrary to my first comment, a strong enough solar flare will probably destroy the submarine cables -- unless the sea water shields them.
So the effects of salt water are pretty strong, but not impossible to overcome. Extremely Long Wave radio systems are actually in use to provide submerged submarines with signals indicating they need to surface and use higher bandwidth communication channels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
Now since there’s a level of RF penetration, you’ll get some antenna effects inducing fluctuating currents which will vary along the cable depending on the depth.
On top of that, the largest CME events can and do affect the earths magnetic field, squashing and warping it. This “moves” the earths magnetic field, and electromagnetism 101 is “conductor + magnetic field + one of these two things moving = induced currents”. So the movement of the earths magnetic field will be able to induce current all the way along the cable regardless of depth, unaffected by the seawater.
How significant the induced current and voltage are... and how vulnerable the powered repeaters and head end equipment are... is something I’ll defer to appropriate experts on.
Anyway nuclear plants undergo quite a bit of study and protection against these kinds of events (solar or military/terrorist EMP) and are expected to just shut down safely.
[1] https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2016/07/05/update-keepin...
[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/epri-threat-of-emp-attacks-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/01/03/can-nucle...
Now, it's not a far stretch to imagine that a CME event causes a power station shut down, as you describe, but without the generators working to keep the reactor cool as it fully shuts down you have a disaster on your hands.
Furthermore chances of this sort of thing happening are increased when the whole planet is affected.
As for hospitals, lots of things came to mind including hospitals. Just in my mind a nuclear disaster seemed to have a much higher potential for wiping out lives.
It's not going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature but it was interesting, made you think about how quickly society might fall apart after an EMP attack.
Disclosure: I work for one of the major providers for GMD/GIC solutions: Computational Physics, Inc.
Anyways, it's a really great show and recommend anyone watch it if they are interested in the space race to the moon.
I feel the same way about other shows on the platform like Servant and Ted Lasso. Apple TV+ is clearly an underdog in streaming, but the quality is high.
Also don't forget about "See", which I laughed at, at first, but it's actually really good. Defending Jacob, Palmer (movie), and The Morning Show (which I still need to start)
[1] https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-abou...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362
[3] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sun-solar-storms-earth-h...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lt7tnd/solar_storms_...
But IIRC, the task of preparing our grid for another Carrington Event isn’t all that dissimilar from protecting it against an EMP attack, and last I read it was remarkably cheap.
Certainly dramatically cheaper than the F-35 program. I seem to recall it was so cheap Congress could practically pay for it with change found in the couch.
I didn't have the stomach to read more about it, but someone in the DOE(?) in the last administration came up with a plan to improve the grid, but because some portion of that story involved renewable energy (thus lessening the need for coal) it was dropped like a hot potato.
(I could have some portion of that wrong; I simply get too depressed reading about that cesspool.)
Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the time? Or would it need to be stored in some sort of faraday cage?
Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.
Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems would be correspondingly larger.
I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure happened in the US North East in 2003, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003.
See https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-te... for some first hand comments.
This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive, even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in dB/dt.
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.
Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear.
Rebuilding after disasters is a tried and true method.
There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones.
Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
This wasn't some unpredictable event. It just wasn't considered sufficiently profitable to prepare.
For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk.
In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization.
Doing enough to be prepared and attempt to avoid preventable failures should be built into market players not going to jail or bankruptcy.
Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it.
- Food
- Power
- Transportation
- Housing/Shelter
These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible."
These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't.
So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the entire grid operational for people to survive, only key infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with cold being much easier to prepare for)
Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach) works in favor of more prep.
Many areas have natural water sources that could be used in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and inexpensive.
Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?
Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.
Far better to have to go manually restart a safed transformer than have to replace a destroyed one.
At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops.
Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.
No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety.
See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-hum...
That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks.
I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).
If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash. Much higher, at that, so the real figures don't need to be anything like this extreme. Low-frequency high-impact risks can lead to that situation and it's one reason why 'the odds' is often too simplistic to be useful in assessing risk. Humans have a general cognitive blind spot when it comes to assessing this kind of thing.
We're generally terrible at predicting how high-impact, low frequency events will impact us and play out and part of that is that our collective reaction is the most unpredictable element, with potential to multiply or mitigate the impacts to a huge degree in either direction. The current pandemic illustrates that quite well, as does Texas. A CME if/when it hits will open us up to a similar opportunity (or risk) of reacting in a way that either minimizes or intensifies the damage.
Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Is that what you and the OP were saying? If so, I could agree with that, rephrased as "the lethality of a CME is higher than that of a car crash".
But what I was thinking is that CMEs are far less likely, so their lethality doesn't matter as much when predicting what you'll die of. I'm far more likely to be involved in a car crash than in a CME, and since fatal car crashes actually occur, I'm far more likely to die in one than in a CME. Simply because the CME is very, very unlikely to happen.
To rephrase it in terms of things that actually happen in our lifetimes more than once: the lethality of plane crashes is very high: you're very unlikely to survive one. Their lethality is higher than that of car crashes. However, if I were to ask you: "is this person, Jane Random, more likely to die of a car crash or a plane crash?", you'd have to bet on the car crash -- simply because plane crashes occur far less often.
(This is purposefully excluding other, likelier causes of death, of course).
Car crashes kill around 35k Americans per year. Whereas let's say a CME would kill 300M Americans. Even if a CME only happens once every 500 years, your chances of dying in a CME would still be vastly greater than your chances of dying in a car crash, because 35,000 * 500 < 300,000,000.
Now granted a CME might not kill 85% of Americans, but they also happen more like every 100 years, rather than every 500. So yeah, the math should actually be pretty terrifying no matter what assumptions you plug in.
I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline.
Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
There are plenty of mechanisms to handle rare disasters rationally. The insurance industry manages a lot of it.
But of course, Earth doesn't have a CEO. On balance I think that is a very good thing. Though it does cause some coordination problems.
The key is to have food stores that will last for months, and skills to repair and maintain equipment etc.
Pick'em yourself, stock your root cellar, and you don't have to go to the store for vegetables until summer.
A> Someone has to be authorized to shut down the grid, and willing to do so with no consideration of politics, nor profit, in the hours before the proton flux hits the earth.
B> Everyone has to obey those instructions despite the politics that will inevitably happen as the bean counters attempt to eek out the last drop of profit and push things too far.
C> The Black Start plans that grid operators have, which would restart the grid from everything off, to a fully functional network, have to survive contact with reality.
The Carrington event cause high voltage discharges in telegraph systems. The power grid handles lightning strokes all the time, way more voltage and current all at once.
The real danger is the large low voltage DC currents, the could cause the iron in the core of transformers to become saturated, after which they will stop working as transformers, and simply become very large heaters as there is suddenly no inductance to stop the flow of current through their primary windings. If the system is off, the currents can flow, and no damage will occur.
TL;DR - if the grid is OFF, it is safe... and someone has to have the authority to make that decision with some lead time to allow it to happen in an orderly manner.
Sorry to be data free; it was an interesting factoid though.
Here is the preparedness strategy (from 2015): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The GB network tends to have relatively short lines and has used a GIC resistant transformer design since the 1990s so would probably only lose 1% or so of its transformers in a Carrington event.
Three phase transformers with five limb cores are particularly vulnerable and have not been installed since 1997 on the GB grid.
"Space Cyberspace Weatherman" really is a possible future job more and more.
There is one author, and here’s his site: https://www.startswithabang.com/
So is Forbes more or less a blog distribution platform now, like Medium or Substack?
I'd like to take a quantitative approach to evaluating and designing mitigations.
Effectively, only 30% (!) of the surface are used for displaying content. What an utter disgrace. And the data volume that is wasted for all of this nonsense...
There's a reason why mobile ads are so much more expensive - it is extremely hard to block them. Chrome and AOSP webkit don't support any kind of adblocking plugins, and editing /etc/hosts requires rooting (which gets ever harder and harder) or weird VPN/fake VPN solutions that have their own massive security and battery life implications.
I never tried it myself so I do not know about the effectiveness and false positives.
Example: "The power grids of most countries would be completely and effectively leveled. The top way to mitigate the effects of such a flare would be through increased grounding, so that the large currents that would otherwise flow through grid wires would instead flow directly into the Earth. Every time power companies attempt to do this, however, what winds up happening instead is that the conducting substance used for grounding (such as copper) is stolen for its material value."
Power grids would not be "completely leveled". And "grounding" is not the issue (although yeah, copper theft is a thing). Source[1] states that Hydro-Quebec tripped for over current on long transmission lines. This has nothing to do with inadequate grounding and the solution was to increase the over current settings because the system could handle the induced current. The system was restored in 9 hours. Another event[2] listed resulted in "disturbances" across a large geographic area: a voltage collapse and unusual power flow but not outages.
If the induced current was much higher the system would trip off to protect itself while the GIC lasted. This could take a while to recover from if it was a wide spread outage but we're not talking a civilization ending event like headlines suggest.
What power companies are most concerned about are damaged transformers. Replacement transformers (at transmission levels anyway) are very expensive and have months to years long lead time so if a few get damaged restoration could take a very long time. But we have literature[3][4] that tells us what transformer designs are susceptible to overheating due to GIC. TLDR: Most modern transformers will be fine.
What I'm more concerned about are satellites. I don't know how many satellites would be disabled and are at risk of collision. That sounds bad. What critical things rely on satellite infrastructure? GPS seems like a big one. Power systems use GPS timing, in some cases to enable differential current protection. But usually these systems will default to impedance protection on a loss of GPS signal and at any rate the industry is probably moving to terrestrial time sources because of the risk of GPS spoofing anyway.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curren... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_August_1972 [3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6281595 [4] https://www.pes-psrc.org/kb/published/reports/GIC%20Presenta...
Source: I have worked on GIC monitoring systems at a major transmission company. But the opinions expressed are my own, etc, etc.
An example of a critical thing that relies on satellite infrastructure are most gas pump payment processing and operations as I understood it.
Regarding transformers there have been various US government level efforts to have back up Replacement transformers ready to go in storage in the last 20 years, the situation has not improved at all and like much single point of failure infrastructure an over reliance on China.
I find it astounding the Pentagon can spend trillions on 'defence' but we can't scrape together the pocket lint to have back up offline infrastructure for the power grid ready to go with staffing and processes in place.
Having said this there is a lot of alarmist information arguably primarily driven by page views floating around.
The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark is a terrific read on the historical context of all this, highly recommend
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691141268/th...
Astounding yes, but it doesn't surprise me. "Defence", no matter the country, and much of aeronautics/astronautics is mostly a jobs creation program. Just look how immensely widespread Airbus, Boeing and EADS are - their operation spans continents, mandated by the lawmakers who fund their programs. No wonder that SpaceX (and Tesla!) who are to a large-ish part privately funded can be so cheap and agile - they simply don't have to account for logistics of transporting all the stuff and produce as much as they can on-site, without nasty politicians shouting from the sideline they want a return (=jobs).
Transformer production doesn't yield to creating many jobs or wide-spread jobs in contrast, and thus it isn't high up on priority lists of politicians. Also, keeping large amounts of spares isn't ideal because the technology itself can date - oils can go rancid, metal can rust, and especially isolator material can break down.
Couldn't that be a good source of jobs, though? Warehousing, guarding, inspections, ongoing maintenance and replacement, logistics for all this. I think it could achieve both meaningful job creation (particularly if you threw in some procedural inefficiencies under the guise of "national security") and meaningful impact on real defensibility of a country.
As a consumer what/is there anything we can do to better protect say a 100W mobile solar panel + chargeable battery + phone? Maybe there is not threat?
Though perhaps useless if the phone can't connect to anything...
Every nation on this planet should by now have a 3 year basic food reserve, to buffer against failing harvests due to global warming weather events/changes.
Its currently difficult to setup, costs too much, we already did it during the cold-war and yet, soon as the wall fell, it was all slashed and cut. I blame the retirement of politicians who remembered how starvation feels.
First real long-term drought with aquifer failings or a cold-burst pre-harvest, will hit us like a hammer. Nothing like mass-starvation, to re-calibrate political priorities.
There is no awareness that the strategic reserve exists only in name now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_grain_reserve
Basically is a price control tool, where over-production is shipped of as aid. What it not is - is a reserve.
Interesting paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237409034_Strategic...
The word "famine" doesn't appear once in the 5000+ word article on the Dust Bowl; and, we know it wasn't really a famine. Poverty-inducing, for sure, but mass starvation is an entirely different type of disaster that is almost always man-made by bad economic policy or war, which I believe is what OP's point was.
Why? MBAs have made way too much money advocating Just In Time (JIT) supply chains. To go back on that would make a fair number of "super smart" business people look short-sighted.
Otoh, there’s a lot of risk from human factors, especially if over a city. With the right placement and timing, it could trigger a nuclear exchange.
Local? An impact in any large city with financial or industrial hubs would have global scale effects. NYC, Tokio, Shenzhen, London, Beijing, Shanghai. Throw a rock at any of those and the world will devolve into chaos.
We could lose most of the cities on earth with largely local impact. NYC would be a problem, but what about Buffalo? Even most national capitals aren't that important globally.
http://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/planetary-scien...
It's also worth noting that there's a reasonably good chance that we might prevent one or more future Tunguska events by spotting asteroids not right before the collide, but much earlier when they're on a trajectory that will eventually collide with Earth years or centuries in the future.
But I do not think it worked. It did burn for 20 minutes and the DVD changed its color, but then the laptop reports the DVD is still empty
This way you can verify the disk at any point in the future.
I have actually tried it multiple times over six hours, and now I have burned three DVDs without files on them