Could an electrical pandemic destroy shipping? | Hacker News Reader

Could an electrical pandemic destroy shipping?

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28 pointsbookofjoe48 comments

The real danger in a Carrington event is that the grid isn't shut down in time and the transformers all have a large dc bias through them and sufficient power to cause saturation, followed by rapid heating and self-destruction.[2]

Covid taught me that rational plans don't work if leadership gets twitchy. Making the decision to turn off the grid is likely to induce that level of twitchiness.

So, we'd get an extra hour or two of the grid, before losing it completely, in an otherwise preventable disaster. Any unplanned shutdown (because of protective relays) is likely to trigger a black start event[1] in any case.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid? / Practical Engineering

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLO9WxVO9s8 The Grid vs. The Next Big Solar Storm / Real Engineering

Should be a no brainer though. And it is not a complex political thing. The grid operator can do it. There must be many triggers for turning off parts or all of it. The UK turned 10% of the grid off last year I think to preserve the frequency.

I don't know a lot about the electrical grid, but I had heard that the Texas grid came within minutes of complete collapse during February 2021. I have no idea how they made the decisions they did, but I feel like at some point you need an engineer or two who understand the consequences of failing to take action standing by to just press the button when the time comes.

They need to install the protective capacitors which would protect the transformer against the DC bias voltage of a Carrington event. If these were installed, there would be no need to consider turning the grid off.

That may work on the larger feeds, but what about all the distribution transformers spread across the world? That's decades of upgrades for little apparent threat. Not only that, you then start interfering with the power factor of everything, possibly increasing resistance losses due to reactive power flows.

As I understand it, a solar storm (which is what the article talks about - clickbait title should be edited) would primarily affect a) satellites b) things with long wires on earth, i.e. the power grid and copper communications.

Not sure how undersea cables that have copper for amplifier power would be affected (e.g. whether water shields from this or not).

To my knowledge, computers should not be directly affected (but may be affected by power grid fluctuations, which shouldn't affect computers on ships).

Ships themselves should be largely unaffected aside from losing access to GPS if the satellites were destroyed. I assume that would disrupt shipping to some extent but not sure how much. Navigating without GPS is possible but less accurate and more time-consuming. It's also unclear if GPS satellites would be affected at all. Their orbit is high enough that changes to the atmosphere shouldn't affect them, and I'm not sure if the increase in solar radiation would be expected to destroy them or not.

This type of event is depicted in Aurora: A Novel by David Koepp (published in June of 2022). I read the book, and I'd rate it maybe 4 of 5 stars. The science was a little light, but it still paints a picture of what might happen if a CME occurs.

I am concerned that should something like this happen nuclear powers might just decide to use "the window of opportunity"

I wouldn’t be worried about the major nuclear powers personally, since all their capabilities are no doubt properly shielded. Israel, Iran, India, Pakistan, maybe North Korea are worth worrying about, but their main targets would be equally capable of shielding their own nuclear capabilities, and the probability of at least one nuclear facility being properly shielded is non-zero so the cost associated with nuclear retaliation is still infinite.

While nuke launching capacity might stay intact, the discovery / tracking might not. So let's say NK launches 10 nukes that land in Russia and 10 nukes that land in the US.

I’m not an expert on these kinds of devices so take this with a grain of salt, but it’s my understanding that while radar cannot be shielded, sonar can.

Not an expert either so let's hope that something like this never happens.

Satellite based launch detection would likely suffer. Literally one detection method we use is measuring ionospheric disturbances caused by a rocket punching through the atmosphere. I’d imagine a solar storm is going to A) Destroy the satellites that measure this and B) generate enough ionospheric noise to invalidate the monitoring.

To achieve what? Most nuclear powers have a strict "no first strike" policy, not to mention that they'll face the condemnation of the rest of the world.

I sincerely hope that ethics and the indomitable human spirit will emerge triumphant in those circumstances.

Haha yes I was thinking strategically alone in my own response to this anxiety. Assuming nuclear state A is willing to become a pariah state in exchange for destroying nuclear state B, the calculus still doesn’t make sense.

I think you are correct in the additional psychological analyses, no sober minded human would willingly fire a nuclear weapon when not forced to strategically, and the economic costs of becoming a pariah state are far too high for state A to even come to the conclusion that it’s worth it to destroy state B (see Russia becoming a pariah state in early 2022 and quickly becoming shut off from the world economy, even from traditional Allies).

Clickbaity title is referring to a solar flare EMPing the electrical grid.

> … this is clearly one of those risks (much like a pandemic) for which we cannot ever be adequately prepared

I disagree with that statement in the article. Adequate preparation is possible. Just do it.

It is possible but very costly. There is no point in spending that much for tail risks.

Right now it seems we are spening too little.

These species level threat things like this and climate change could be solved overnight if you just removed the concept of money. It’s mad how we hold our economic system above these sorts of possibilities. I don’t have a utopian answer to how to balance things in the right way but it’s just interesting to me that we have the material capability to do this stuff, but because of a monetary system that isn’t physically real (but is in reality) we can’t.

How is a solar storm a species level threat? Life does just fine without electricity.

I suppose I imagine the world being suddenly without power would cause a catastrophic amount of deaths.

Yes absolutely. A mass death event on a scale previously unseen.

You'll need a bigger gun to threaten the species though.

Civilization is fragile, life is resilient

In fact there are about 750,000,000 people alive today with no access to electricity. That's not to say they could all live off the land if society falls apart, but someone's going to survive.

Ok let’s just ignore the money aspect then. In this case we are talking about radiation shielding, which is made from metals that have to be mined at great environmental cost and then smelted with lots of energy input. That environmental impact is not worth mitigating such an unlikely risk.

I didn’t know that was the case. Every day is a school day!

Coordinating how we expend resources, and on what, is always the biggest problem, by far, and that would be true under any system I can think of. Money is a very imperfect solution to the problem, but that doesn’t mean money is the the problem.

A lot of people’s thinking about these issues essentially starts with “assume a benevolent dictator.” That’s a big assumption!

Fewer gripes about capitalism; more grooming of the global bug tree.

The nice thing about money driving human behavior is we have a functioning society while still maintaining most personal freedoms.

Money sucks but it is an effective way to trick our self-interested brains into creating value for society. It leverages our own greed to make us hard-workers. It is a way better lever than fear or compassion.

> Money sucks but it is an effective way to trick our self-interested brains into creating value for society.

The only reason why I'm not creating more value for society (I have some social side-projects that never get my entire attention) is money. My NGO self-funded projects cannot compete with my salary working for a shit startup producing no value for society whatsoever but burning through VC money.

Blaming money is shooting the messenger.

For one thing, if you try to get rid of money, you'll quickly end up inventing it again just to manage complicated distributions of resources. You might not call it money, but it will acquire all the same connotations.

For another: Consider what happens if you try to get rid of money, then run a major grid-hardening project. Who builds/works in the factories you need? Why do they do that instead of writing poetry or going fishing? How do they eat? Someone has to grow the food, right? Apply the same questions recursively.

We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money.

I don’t disagree at all. I was mindful to say that I definitely don’t have a utopian solution. I just meant that if the world really needed to do something we had the capability to do, but not the money or be wiped out, I would like to think we did it instead of just saying bye to the planet because we don’t have enough overdraft :’)

You seem to think the money supply is fixed. It's not. We saw this just recently with Covid: governments simply printed more money to give out as assistance payments. That's exactly what would happen in your doomsday scenario: the government orders stuff to be built/done, then prints up the money to pay people to do it, then worries about inflation later after the crisis is over.

>We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money.

That wasn't communism, they they tried to call it that. That was "authoritarian socialism", an authoritarian single-party system with central planning. It had money just like any other economy; the big difference is that central government planners decided how the market would run, what would be made by factories, etc. It failed largely because central planning doesn't work very well. In theory, maybe if some smart AI were doing the central planning with plenty of feedback, it could work really well, but the way the Soviets tried it, it was a big failure.

Still, your point stands: the system still needs money. As long as individuals can make their own individual choices about things, they need money as an exchange of value and way to limit resource consumption. Otherwise, what's to stop a few mentally ill people from grabbing everything off the store shelves for themselves? Or to keep a large fraction of people from taking too much. leaving nothing for everyone else?

> “A massive geomagnetic storm would sever all of these links on a global scale… Estimates of global damage differ by an order of magnitude, from $2 trillion to $20 trillion,

Except that it can't happen. It will never happen. It happened in '89 and only affected a few million people. They all had power back within nine hours.

People watch too many movies. EMPs and CMEs are frankly overrated.

Can you explain?

Another Carrington event would likely be catastrophic. Telegraph operators were talking to each other with the power sources disconnected. Everyone over the world experienced it. Can you imagine what would happen to our very delicate and unshielded electronics today?

The question is how common a Carrington event really is. You could start to find out by looking for historical accounts of aurora in equatorial regions that coincide with aurora in other parts of the world.

> Another Carrington event would likely be catastrophic.

I've seen plenty of breathless doomsday porn on the subject, but I will go a considerable distance out on a branch to charitably assume that you did not mistake any of this for actual analysis and instead formed your opinion on the basis of something a bit more credible (or at least thoughtfully conducted). I'd be interested in reading that. Could you link me? Thanks.

Depends how you feel about electromagnetism? Do electromagnetic waves moving through space induce voltage on a conductor?

If yes, a sufficiently powerful solar storm could easily destroy electrical transmission lines, fry every inductive motor on the planet and (if strong enough) permanently disable every consumer grade radio in existence.

The western world would have a very bad time.

It'll fry electrical distribution.

Motors and electronics apart from ones in orbit will not be affected.

This will be enough.

If you read the wiki of the Carrington event, telegraph operators were getting electrocuted and the pylons were throwing sparks because of the EM induction. I could be wrong, but this doesn't sound like an event the grid or consumer electronics are designed to handle.

Some people today estimate that you really only need to take down around a dozen key power stations to essentially take down the whole grid in the lower 48. If the Carrington event was indeed worldwide, we wouldn't be able to get back to where we were for a while. We're talking little or no electricity, little or no radio, etc.

Again, the question really comes down to "What are the odds?" The CE seems to be very, very unlikely. If there were a handful of historical accounts of aurora in equatorial regions worldwide I think we'd be much more proactive about it.

> Can you imagine what would happen to our very delicate and unshielded electronics today?

Nothing is that unshielded. Things were designed to survive lightning back then, and they are designed to survive lightning now.

The question is really how our power distribution grids will fare. And the experience with telegraph back then is very relevant.

How do you shield a radio receiver from electromagnetic disturbances on the antenna?

What frequences we're talking about?

For the purposes of this discussion, lets say “the same frequencies the radio operates on”

Mili-Hertz to micro-Hertz.

That's where almost all the energy is. AFAIK, it doesn't start to become a problem because current antenna have an incredibly low sensitivity on that range. But well, I can easily overlook some detail.

1989 was not as strong as the Carrington event.

Solar storms have happened in the past and will happen again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms

I have little doubt that a strong event could cause severe disruptions and i see no reason why it won't happen eventually.

Could be code for wide nuclear war EMPs?

I'm more interested in the survival rate of non-hardened low earth satellites -- most of which are not engineered to survive severe geomagnetic storms.

Heck, a good solar storm could knock GPS out for a day or two -- what's the economic impact of that?

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