I’m intrigued 🤔
Discussion
https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/solarstorms-mat-stein
short story:
- Transformers (among other components) get fried in the right kind of solar flare; immediate result is grid down in the region. With a large enough flare, this could be hundreds of miles, up to half the country.
- Replacing transformers takes on the order of **years** (difficult supply chain, reliance on foreign countries, etc.)
- When the grid is down, nuclear plants melt down if not powered by backup generators
- There is **some** diesel on hand to power the above for a bit, but not for long enough (remember Fukushima?) ...and imagine trying to truck diesel to dozens of plants around potentially thousands of miles of country that is at the moment fully without power for potentially weeks or months and probably under martial law.
We've had solar storms of this magnitude before. look up the Carrington Event. At the time our electrical infrastructure was in its infancy so "not much happened". If that happened today, you'd be looking at the picture I described above.
Ah, I already knew about this. Thought there’s more to it. But definitely this is something that occasionally keeps me up at night. It’s pretty wild most transformers in key plants and infra doesn’t have some shielding in case of events like this. I guess we should all start prepping sooner rather than later.
Mitigation/protection is feasible, but the industry was really slow to get the drift. I think things look better now than they did five years ago when I was first looking into this.
it should be added that with the obvious issues going on with the drift of the magnetic poles at what appears to be an accelerating rate - records date back to a little before the time of the Carrington Event, there is good reason to believe that just like energy level required for the sun to trigger a massive atmospheric electricity dump, is a lot lower than it was then.
i'm pretty sure all things being equal that the last 4 major geomagnetic storms in the last 2 years if it weren't for all that shielding and countermeasures that we would be looking at electrical wires catching fire now every time X-ray flux passes some threshold.
I should add that this video is now quite old and things have gotten a little better since then. a little
During the Carrington Event, telegraph wires caught on fire.
Indeed.
the "disruption" was "minimal" because our society wasn't as extraordinarily dependent on its electrical infrastructure for basic survival.
partly because they were telegraph wires and not power wires. most signal cables now are shielded. the voltages that would be induced would likely not fuse most electrical distribution wiring, that's not the vulnerability, it's the transformers, like nostr:npub19ma2w9dmk3kat0nt0k5dwuqzvmg3va9ezwup0zkakhpwv0vcwvcsg8axkl says, they are not radio-shielded, enough, at least. and i think even if that hole was patched, there is a threshold beyond which most of the last mile wires are too thin to cope with the temporary spike in current from the x-ray driven ionization combined with strong/fast solar wind and good coupling between the solar wind polarity and the earth's magnetic pole.
Personally I'm bored of Carrington Event and pole shift doomers. Most of the rest of the prepper community for that matter.
There is no reliable or useful data for predicting how often those events happen and they are semi random not clockwork anyhow. Stop saying "We're due" when you have no way of knowing. Semi random + geological time scales means potentially thousands of years from now even if we are thousands of years overdue already.
2nd; you're fucked, I'm fucked, everybody is fucked. Stop fantasizing in your mind that you are the enlightened one who will be able to prep just right and survive. Any disaster of that scale has a massive amount of randomness in who makes it.
3rd; I love my guns and ammo as much as the next guy. One of my guns has actually saved my life so I'm not just saying that to sound cool. I still have needed a quality first aid kit far more often than a gun. I've been dehydrated to a point it affected my cognition more often than I've needed a gun. I've had hypothermia more often than I've needed a gun. I've been lost miles from where I thought I was more often than I've needed a gun.
You need air, water, shelter, food in that order then maybe a gun will be useful. More likely in a disaster scenario a proper FUCK first aid kit long before a gun. Every natural disaster shows over and over and over that survivors come together after a catastrophic event not some mad max roving bandit movie scenario.
TLDR; If you are buying guns and ammo ahead of paper maps, compasses, water purification, insulation, and first aid, and communications you aren't prepping. You are just propping up your fragile ego with a Rambo fantasy.
That sounds like what a “mad max” prepper would tell the others, so his job would be easier.
Disarm the masses.
I'm with you on this one, Bill.