What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today? (2011) | Hacker News Reader

What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today? (2011)

news.nationalgeographic.com

39 pointsnhebb21 comments

A coronal mass ejection comparable to the one causing the Carrington event of 1859 did indeed occur, a year after this article was published. The CME missed Earth by nine days of Earth's orbit. If the CME had hit Earth, the estimated cost was $2.6 trillion and up to a decade for full recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012

> and up to a decade for full recovery.

Do you have any idea what that would look like?

Are we talking "back to our standard of living" or are we talking about "recouping from lost economic activity / damage expenses"?

We'd be talking replacing huge parts of our infrastructure, cabling, power grid and large amounts of anything with chips in.

The currents induced in the telegraph lines where so great they melted components in the offices.

You'd be looking at replacing a big chunk of what's in space, GPS and similar would be heavily affected if not knocked out entirely.

Industrial plants and factories would be wrecked, production would be heavily hit, wide spread fires the works.

It would be catastrophic.

I guess it would be the kind of thing that makes you glad you've purchased an AC generator.

Because AC generators run on rainbows and unicorns? In other words, in a power outage that is not relatively localized you're not going to be able to buy the fuel to run it on.

The biggest problem with a relatively short (less than a day or two) outages is in northern locations in the winter because of pipes freezing. I have thought about buying a generator for those scenarios but it's not really worthwhile unless it's hooked into your house electrical system. Plus you have to be around to operate it. Starts to look expensive to guard against a relatively rare scenario.

Well, I live in California, so burst pipes is not an issue.

The generator runs on the same type of gas as both our cars and my motorcycle. Our neighbors are very close, everyone has two cars or more (there's a ton of cars on this street), and the generator is big enough to deliver 1...2 kW to four residences. We could pool the gas with the neighbors.

It would not run 24/7, we would run it for 1 or 2 hours each evening - and charge the 18650 cells for flashlights while it's running. I think we could get at least a couple weeks out of it, just burning the gas in all those tanks (assuming an average of 50% gas level for all vehicles).

I think the bigger problems would be just finding enough AC cord extenders for everyone, and having enough water for this duration (not sure what would happen to the utilities in such an event). Also, perhaps, another issue would be guarding a valuable resource (the generator) during a time of civil chaos.

Anyway, I haven't purchased the generator specifically for this scenario. I just happen to have one around, and then once I had it, thinking about stuff like the Carrington event was sort of natural.

P.S.: I'm not a prepper, not even close. I guess it's just a strange kind of fun, on some level, to think about such contingencies.

Fair enough. On the other hand, if you're in temperate weather, it's not clear what a generator really buys you that some propane/butane stoves and lanterns, maybe some camping solar chargers, and some big blocks of ice don't buy you. Obviously, there are specific issues--perhaps associated with medical equipment for example--that require AC and in that case a generator and some stored fuel would certainly be advised.

I don't really keep those things as part of disaster preparedness but I camp enough that I own a lot of it and if the forecast calls for it, I make sure I know where I can grab it.

>during a time of civil chaos

I've been through extended (multi-day) power outages and things never reached the civil chaos point :-) I expect in the US, things would have to get pretty extreme to reach that. [EDIT: I should say outside of certain urban settings where blackouts have certainly led to significant unrest.]

It's pretty useful to be able to keep the refrigerator cold and have running water in the house so you don't have to go full native if the power is out for more than a day.

I'd recommend a diesel generator instead. You can store diesel for years without it going bad. Not so for gasoline. So you can have a supply of fuel and not be caught short if your cars' tanks aren't full when a long term outage happens. Also, gasoline powered generators tend to be a lot less durable if you run them for long periods of time.

I'm not a prepper either, but where I live the power outages are frequent enough that it makes you think about backup plans. So a solid diesel generator, a 50 gallon drum of diesel, and a pickup truck that runs on diesel. That will take care of a long term outage for quite a while.

> You can store diesel for years without it going bad.

If you are storing below ~20C and in perfectly dry conditions and you have added biocides and stabilisers then maybe.

General guidelines for storing in a decent tank are 12 months.

http://www.bellperformance.com/blog/bid/114020/Guidelines-Fo... has a good overview

I remember been amazed that bacteria are an issue, they can "eat" the fuel.

Oh, that article again. This has been discussed before, especially on Slashdot.

There are two things to worry about. One is a threat to space satellites. The other is a threat to certain long power transmission lines. There is no damage threat to ground-based electronics not attached to really long wires (many miles, longer than CO to phone loops.)

The threat to power transmission is simply that different parts of the earth temporarily have different electrical potentials at "ground". This is only an issue for long transmission lines, hundreds of miles. DC superimposed on AC causes partial transformer saturation and reduces transformer capacity. If undetected, this can burn out transmission transformers.

Since this happened in a big way in 1989, US transmission systems have added DC sensing at key points in the system, and have ways of dealing with the problem. Here's the popular explanation.[1] If you're really interested, here's the training material for the people who sit in US east coast power control rooms and decide what to do about it. Read the section on "geomagnetic disturbances"[2] If you're really, really interested, you can look up "PJM eData Guest Access" and bring up a huge Flash page which shows the current status of the east coast electrical grid. Under "Emergency actions", any current solar storm activity and related problems are mentioned. Nothing is happening today. A few times a year, there's enough solar activity that grid controllers prepare to take action. There was a moderate solar storm on June 22nd. Did you notice?

The effect on fiber optic cables is zero.

[1] http://pluggedin.pjm.com/2014/09/keeping-alert-for-solar-act...

[2] http://www.pjm.com/~/media/training/nerc-certifications/re6-...

>Even now, the center's Bogdan said, the most damaging emissions from big storms travel slowly enough to be detected by sun-watching satellites well before the particles strike Earth. "That gives us [about] 20 hours to determine what actions we need to take," Viereck said.

>In a pinch, power companies could protect valuable transformers by taking them offline before the storm strikes. That would produce local blackouts, but they wouldn't last for long.

>"The good news is that these storms tend to pass after a couple of hours," Bogdan added.

Simple. Turn everything off. Going without power for a few hours is not as a big deal that everyone makes it out to be.

All of San Diego lost power for about 8 hours a few years back and it taught me one thing; losing power for less than 12 hours is not really that much of an issue. I think San Diego could have made 24 hours with little trouble.

Something to consider is that during normal blackouts, critical things like hospitals have backup power. If this happened, they would have no option but to turn on the generators and pray. Most will lose their backup power unless unless their systems are designed to survive an EMP blast.

Losing the power grid is different than going without electricity. Odds are that when San Diego was without power, places like hospitals were running close to normal using their own generators. Taking those offline is a much bigger deal and almost certainly would require sacrificing human lives that would be saved with electricity. It is much harder to make a proactive decision like turning off the power when it comes at the cost of human life.

If we are serious about addressing these risks however, the cost of hardening only critical electrical infrastructure that we can't turn off, like hospitals, ATC, nuclear power plant control systems, should be a lot less than hardening everything.

But a poster above pointed out we (US, via Congress) aren't even willing to spend ~$3B hardening the power grid. That seems like a pretty low ball number; I'd imagine shielding just the things you mentioned would cost at least that much.

Valid point. Although if I'm a hospital administrator and give X dollars for disaster preparedness I would spend that money on something that has a higher likelihood of saving lives than solar storm preparedness. That is the problem with these incredibly rare but highly destructive events. Do you spend $1 million to definitely save 10 lives or do you spend that $1 million on something which has the 0.01% chance of saving 100,000 lives?

Nuclear power plants have a safety mode. Airplanes can be landed and turned off. ATC can be turned off after the planes have landed. Hospitals would be tricky because some electronic devices do not a manual labor replacement and I think there would be deaths related to a forced blackout.

The only thing that I could think of off the top of my mind would be satellites and ships at sea.

I will admit, it would be a rough couple of days afterwards as we figured out what survived and what did not. But I don't think it would be catastrophic.

> Turn everything off.

Speaking of that, and addressing a concern I've seen in places:

The way I understand the physics involved here, it should be indeed enough to power off things and unplug from AC, copper networking, and any other long cables. It would not be necessary to put electronics in Faraday cages.

Unless we're talking about RF receivers, in which case I'm not sure. I guess they should be fine if not connected to long antenna wires.

What happens to all the power being generated by all the wind farms, solar cells, and nuclear and coal plants (and hydroelectric?)? My understanding is that those can't go on- and off-line rapidly (one of the big advantages of natural gas plants). Is there a way to "ground" the excess, or does that end up causing problems with over-supply in the parts of the grid still online?

Also, won't the flux from the solar storm cause current to flow through power lines, regardless of what is actually connected? I suppose the transformers would still be protected, but there may still be damage to grid.

I posted this because of Sam's piece on Energy came on the heals of me listening to the organizer of the Survivor Library [1] on NPR this weekend. If the world experienced another solar flare on level with the Carrington Event [2], we'd be screwed.

In the US, bills introduced to spend the ~$3B to shield the power grid have died in committee several times. I'm not a survivalist / bunker builder, but it does seem like a relatively cheap insurance policy to guard against catastrophe.

[1] http://www.survivorlibrary.com/?page_id=1014

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

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