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It is the large current that overloads transformers, circuit breakers, and anything else that happens to be connected to the grid. So wrapping a transformer in a Faraday cage would provide no protection as the damage isn't from EMF.

It is not the current itself from the geomagnetic storm which damages the transformer.

What happens is that the low frequency common mode current from the geomagnetic storm moves the B-H curve of the transformer core toward saturation. When that happens, the inductance falls and the existing 60 Hz circulating current increases catastrophically causing failure do to high temperature in the copper windings. If power was removed before this happened, then the transformer would survive.

Unfortunately lead time for constructing the largest transformers is months to years and the US no longer even has the facilities to do so; they have to be imported. The example transformer which failed in the 1989 event was only replaced in a timely manner because there was an suitable unused transformer for a nuclear plant which was cancelled.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/...
http://www.solarstorms.org/Spo...

Other in the fairy-tale world of slashdot's nuclear fanboys, we know nothing like that. In fact, we have a lot of confirming evidence
that the LNT holds to very small doses.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.solarstorms.org/Thr...
And a video for the layman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is a fallacy. That we adapted to radiation doesn't mean that radiation is good for us.

As a reference.. How come some areas with a higher background radiation show a lower amount of lung-cancer cases? http://webecoist.momtastic.com...

Water is good for us... but not if we drink 10 liters of it.. I can imagine the same is true for radiation where small doses will result in a immune-response that trains the body to kill cells that starts misbehaving... but i'm not a doctor..

The problem is people having opinions about science without being able to read the relevant scientific literature.

I completely agree.

Space Micro doesn't list the prices of their components or systems, nor can I find any from anyone else. Honeywell don't list their prices either. Atmel seem to have dropped out of the field. Linear don't list the prices for their space-hardened stuff. Don't see any for BAE either, or Intersil. Empire Magnetics require a lot of personal data before they give you access to even the price classification information. Not the prices, just how they're classified.

You've got to allow for a year's worth of traveling outside of an atmosphere and then operating on Mars for the duration of the mission. This analysis of radiation for manned missions suggests you're looking at 3.5 mSv per day, then 20 rems per year in most of the places of interest.

Converting everything to rads, it's 0.1 rads per mSv and 1 rad per rem, so that's 12.75 rads to get to Mars if you assume a year-long trip, plus 20 rads for the mission, so anything with a rating of less than 32.75 rads is pretty much guaranteed to fail. However, over the course of a two years, the odds of there being a solar flare are not insignificant. To be safe, you want resistance to a further 400 rad. 432.75 rad is within the tolerance of most of the space-hardened components (some components can be taken up to 1000 rad, others up to 10,000). However, the cheapest space components would NOT survive. You're talking high-end on the space scale.

I'm going to figure that the top-line components will cost 100x that of their conventional counterparts, due to the higher-level of precision and QA that are required. It might well be a good deal more. In Russia, you've also got to pay for smuggling decent-grade hardware out of the US, as all of this stuff will be under massive amounts of regulation.

My guess is that the cuts would have saved enough that those doing the cost-cutting could buy second homes in Switzerland.

than hoping another 1859 won't happen again.

There is no need for hope. The storms passed and as you can see, nothing happened. Slashdot is just once again days late to the party.

http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html

mmm, I like to err on the side of caution, especially when history paints a different story.

http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html

http://www.solarstorms.org/CanadaPipelines.html I don't know if anyone else here has posted this link yet...

Quebec knows what they're talking about.

Wow! I'm glad that didn't happen to Canada! :D /ducks

Quebec knows what they're talking about.

Yes, the Skynet project includes a huge amount of ground infrastructure - terminals in jeeps, terminals on ships, terminals in shipping containers, terminals anywhere that an MoD Procurement Executive employee could imagine a member of the armed forces needing a terminal. So that was an unfair comparison to use; sorry.

I suspect there isn't very much deep-black material on Skynet, it was constructed via a complicated scheme of industrial contracts as a showpiece of private-finance-initiative procurement, and I can't see the kind of people who have weird packages to fly wanting the exposure risk of having extra clauses in the contract detailing the packages. I've worked a small amount on projects near Skynet, but on the documentation and assurance side rather than anywhere near either money or bent metal - yes, in a past life I was a civil servant.

The DVB satellites are off-the-rack ones (in as much as satellites ever are) which are supported by infrastructure that's already there, so I'm a bit more confident about that $400 million figure.

Actually, http://www.solarstorms.org/Sinsurance.html has some interesting numbers - Intelsat 'have declined to purchase insurance for satellites costing less than $150M', suggesting that some of their satellites cost more than that.

Envisat-1 (according to http://www.hq.nasa.gov/webaccess/CommSpaceTrans/SpaceCommTransSec34/CommSpacTransSec34.html) has 70% of its (http://ec.europa.eu/research/press/2002/pr0103en.html) about 2.3 billion Euro cost for satellite and launch services, though that is a large satellite bristling with novel detectors.

There are a number of anecdotal comments already about Windows/Linux media centers on planes, and how "robust" they are. Many of these failures are hardware failures - specifically, "Single-Event Upsets" (SEU), which are bit-flips in hardware memory that occur regardless of software choice. As feature sizes on modern RAM and CPUs shrink, their susceptibility to neutron radiation increases, to the point (which was about a decade ago) that operators at aircraft altitudes should expect some type of memory failure (CPU register, program/data cache, RAM, etc.) every 2-3 hours on equipment which has not been rad-hardened (expensive/heavy) or designed to withstand these effects (expensive). EDAC can help to prevent some of these errors, but not all of them, since software alone can not guarantee detection of SEUs. In-flight entertainment centers are probably not the first place the airline decides to spend all of their money - these systems are probably as SEU-tolerant as any run-of-the-mill desktop.

1989 was pretty entertaining.

I agree it's not economical, but 10%/year degradation is FUD.
More like 1-2%/year for good panels in normal radiation.

(10-20% over TEN years)

Here's a graph..(read down)
http://www.solarstorms.org/Svulnerability.html