This is quite an article. Read the whole thing to understand how this all works and how utterly unprepared we are for it.
Wired has some articles about our power grid: here, here, here and here.
IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. [...] Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
[...]
The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth“). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Here’s some significant science news. Can’t post the many links because the post gets labeled as spam:
‘Cold Fusion’ Rebirth? New Evidence For Existence Of Controversial Energy Source
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called “cold fusion” that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.
#10 clean energy has nothing to do with it. Even clean power travels on wire and uses transformers and that is exactly what is susceptible here. Get over yourself.
If nothing else, it’ll be a good year for skip!
Cq Cq Cq Dx…
No, no, No !!!
It’s the SUPERVOLCANO ARMEGGEDON in 2012 — get out of Jackson Hole, WHILE YOU CAN !!!
I’m moving to the Northwest with enough materials to make SMORES for at least 2 years !!!
#8
Mayans, not Aztecs. The Mayans had a fairly complex math and science for their time. The Aztecs were the mercenary street gang of latin american ancient culture.
If the Sun is a threat and does not cave in to reasonable demands then it must be attacked.
I saw this movie over the weekend, it’s the new Nick Cage movie Knowing
From the article:
It’s silly statements like this that strain credulity. The temporary loss of our electric grid would be worse than, say, a 4-mile wide comet striking the earth?
I’m reminded of the Onion headline after the east coast power outage some years back: “Blackout Survivors Recount Tales of Harrowing Inconvenience.”
You exploit the sun for free light heat and electricity. You should expect that one day it’ll fight back.
Some people are surrendering.
Terry Frewin, a local Sierra Club representative, said he had tough questions for state regulators. “Deserts don’t need to be sacrificed so that people in L.A. can keep heating their swimming pools,” Mr. Frewin said.
http://nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/earth/24ecowars.html?_r=2&ref=science
I’ve been preparing faraday cages and surge surpressors just in case. I never did trust that big burning ball of gas. There’s a level of technology that I’m not willing to live without. The worst part would be the loss of communications infrastructure. It could mean the death of the internet. GASP!
Um, the large transformers that regulate power distribution on the grid go bye-bye forever. There are not enough replacements for them, probably less than ten percent. Some places would not get power back for years.
There would be a lot of places that are attached to the grid that would catch on fire from the power surge as well. You know, your house, the Fire Department, Walmart, gas stations, stuff like that.
This is the same sort of result you get not just from a solar event like 1859, but from electromagnetic pulse effects from nuclear weapons. They’ve ( The Government.) has done studies. It’d be a disaster that’d probably kill tens of millions in the long run. it’d turn this great nation of ours into the land it once was, a howling wilderness, inhabited by savages.
Cold fusion is heating up:
237th American Chemical Society National Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT, March 22-26, 2009
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions
Introducing low energy nuclear reactions Jan Marwan
Low-energy nuclear reaction research: 2009 ACS update Steven B. Krivit
Condensed matter nuclear science discoveries
Scott R Chubb Sr., Talbot A. Chubb
From cold fusion to condensed matter nuclear science: 20 years of research Michael Charles Harold McKubre
Twenty year history of LENR research using Pd/D codeposition Frank E. Gordon, Stanislaw Szpak, P. A. Mosier-Boss, Melvin H. Miles, Lawrence Forsley
From the proof of principle to a working prototype
Antonella De Ninno
Practical use of nuclear quadrupole and internal magnetic field augmented LENR Dennis Cravens, Rod Gimpel, Vince Golubic
Low Energy Nuclear Transmutation
Composition of particles in heavy water electrolyte after electrolysis John Dash, Qiongshu Wang
Transmutation with glow discharge
Irina B. Savvatimova, John Dash
Reproducible generation of nuclear particles during electrolysis Richard A. Oriani
Nuclear transmutation of isotopes in biological systems: History, models, experiments and perspectives Vladimir Vysotskii, Alla Kornilova
Nanonuclear reactions in condensed matter
Lawrence Forsley, Frank E. Gordon, Pamela A. Mosier-Boss
Isotopic changes of elements caused by various conditions of electrolysis Tadahiko Mizuno
Characterization of distinctive materials with which to generate nuclear transmutation
Hideo Kozima
Effect of hydrogen stoichiometry (x) on the lattice expansion in metal-Hx systems Nicolas Amanet
Understanding the palladium–hydrogen (deuterium) electrochemistry as crucial step to approach low energy nuclear reactions Jan Marwan
You are correct!! It is a movie!! It’s called “Knowing”, I saw it last night, stars Nicholas Cage. It was a pretty good movie until it got churchy, but I suppose that was to be expected. Trying to explain creationism via aliens and cosmic danger. Seems either a lot was cut out or it was just a bad story to begin with.
Since the beginning of time the Sun has yearned to destroy man.
Okay, okay dammit, the Mayans. Satisfied?
Don’t you hate it when people copy/paste a bunch of shit they google that nobody reads?
So you have 3 years to go buy yourself a small generator and some fuel. Then if the grid fails, you can at least get some juice at home from time to time. Hell, the Iraqis have mastered the home-grown electricity biz since their grid was, is, and remains a joke.
Great! Yet one more thing to keep me up at night worrying!
Neah, another long tale from those darn Libs. As long as i have my Big Mac, my gun and my Bible, I don’t give a damn.