Slashdot Mirror
British Government Prepares For Solar Storms
judgecorp writes "The British Government has announced its plans to handle solar storms. The idea is to improve the resilience of infrastructure, including satellite communications — which the government says will also be useful against the future possibility of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons. From the report: 'National Grid and DECC are building on the work of the Space Environment Impacts Evaluation Group and E3C to analyse the range of impacts of extreme space weather events, with the Carrington Event being adopted as the reasonable worst case. These scientific assessments have enabled National Grid to change the design requirements for its Supergrid transformers, and to increase its reserve holding of transformers. National Grid is currently developing improved monitoring tools with the British Geological Survey (BGS) and installing or reinstalling Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC) monitoring devices into its Strategic Asset Management program. The next steps will be for National Grid, in association with BGS and working with E3C, to develop more detailed modelling of severe space weather events including impacts on generator transformers. This will extend and strengthen its analysis on the electricity transmission system completed so far.'"
In the event of a nasty solar storm, the brits can just pile up the acronyms generated by their preparedness program and hide behind those. The bureaucratic verbiage should be dense enough to stop all but neutrinos.
You do realize that protecting against EMP is a side benefit of protecting against the much more likely solar storms that can induce huge currents in power grids and wreak havoc with satellites, right?
Oh wait. You are busy having fun. My mistake. Carry on.
Spending some money to harden the electricity distribution system against a major solar flare isn't such a bad idea when you consider the alternative. Even the relatively minor event in Canada a few years ago took months to put right, now imagine a major city like London or New York if you woke up one morning and there was no power and little hope of getting it restored for months or years because the distribution grid is shot and every country in the world is in the same boat trying to buy up new transformer capacity.
Assuming you mean natural causes there's a way to analyze geologic cores to detect proton events and it was roughly a 1 in 500 year storm.
On the other hand, since we seem to have "500 year floods" every year in the news reports, we should probably be a little worried.
As a ham radio guy I'd like to see a legendary flare just under the permanent damage rating. Point the 6M beam north, fire up the amp, make aurora contact all the way down to Panama or something... Sucks for the HF guys, but I'd have fun, and its only temporary.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It was speed cameras that got torched.
The problem with using a EMP device to take out CCTV is that it also takes out all the Sky boxes and widescreen TVs tuned to the football making it unlikely that disgruntled citizens would ever consider using one...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Not that I doubt the word of AC, but you got a source for that? And how many is xxx?
It can always get worse. The trick to these things is not forgetting what your worst case scenario is. People tend to go, "well, we're ok for everything up to Carrington." In retellings, that gets abbreviated to "We don't have to worry about EMP." Then you count on the system to an inappropriate level, and then it goes out.
If it goes long enough, "We don't have to worry about EMP" will become "It will never go down." I've never seen a system that lasts long enough not get this treatment. There's no reason to think this one will be any different. The only proof is to continually inspect your assumptions, but let's be realistic, that ain't happening.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Yes, it's obvious... it doesn't mean it's an less ridiculous. Unless, of course, you look at whose investments are being coddled.
The infrastructure in question; electrical and telecommunications mainly, is incredibly valuable. Especially so in the context of communicating for business and political purposes. Can you imagine what might happen to the momentum of financial transactions in the event that we lose the ability to communicate? Even worse, what would happen to the general population if they lost their ability to be entertained or informed by the propaganda machines of government?
If we were left to our own devices for any great length of time, we might learn real social skills and stop paying attention to the great leaders in the high halls of marketing and advertising. Think of what might happen if we all just learned to get along with each other!
If the sun erupts during the Olympics the sun will be declared a terrorist and will be attacked and if captured held at a secret foreign prison.
There was one in Canada in 1989. http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/12
I would imagine there'd be more issues about providing food to the populace than "communicating for business and political purposes".
Or do you really think that the grocery stores and such are going to keep right on going with no power for, say, refrigerators?
Having lived through Katrina (I was in the eye of Katrina for a bit), I'm not especially thrilled at the possibility that power distribution might be knocked out over a large part of the world....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Back in the 70s, when long-haul telecom cables were still made out of copper instead of fiber, there was a cable that failed due to electromagnetic effects of a solar flare. I don't remember the details well, but I think it was an L4 or L5 cable from Chicago to New York or something about like that; the department I was in at Bell Labs had a few physicists who were studying the results. (And yes, the study was prompted by EMP concerns from the military, as well as general reliability. We also had some people studying lightning effects.)
While that's not a significant risk for most parts of the telecom system, since we don't have a lot of 500-mile antennas any more, the electric power systems still use metal that's isolated from ground. So you could still get a significant voltage induced on a cable that could affect equipment at the end, unless you design to avoid it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks