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.
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.
Discussion
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.