Feds Have a Plan For Catastrophic Solar Flares (digitaljournal.com)

New submitter Steve Sacco, referencing the newly released National Space Weather Strategy and the National Space Weather Action Plan, written in anticipation of large-scale disruptions from a solar flare or similar event, writes: Released on October 28, 2015, the White House plan involves the coordination of agencies from the federal level, state level, and including emergency managers, academia, the media, the insurance industry, nonprofit organizations and the private sector, all in preparation for the worst-case scenario possible, such as the Carrington Event that took place in 1859.

Comments

They have no plan

[fyngyrz]

If you actually read TFA and TFD's, there is no plan. What there is, is an outline for a plan. This is about what they should do to prepare a plan -- it's not an actual plan.

Once they have a plan, then they need specially prepared gear, vehicles, etc. They don't have enough hardened / sheltered "stuff" to even have a hope of dealing with a really significant event.

If you don't have solar power stored in a nice dark box inside a Faraday cage, along with (at least) a radio and anything electrical you need to survive*, you won't even have the beginnings of what you'll need to going to do well -- and the government is not, in any way, prepared to help you out at this time. And your neighbors... they aren't going to be happy you're okay, and they are not, either.

* I do... I photograph auroras for fun, and in learning about them... and as I am both a ham and an engineer... it does tend to provoke some paranoia. And as for the neighbors... this is Montana. :)

Re:They have no plan

[Dan East]

If you don't have solar power stored in a nice dark box inside a Faraday cage, along with (at least) a radio and anything electrical you need to survive

We're talking about a solar flare, not an EMP from a nuke at ground zero. The only reason massive solar flares damage things is because we have millions of miles of wires stretched across entire continents acting like massive antennas absorbing the energy from the flare on a massive, massive scale. The primary risk is the infrastructure itself going down - mainly in the form of tens of thousands of power transformers being destroyed. It's also possible that anything plugged into the grid can also be damaged, similar to a lightning strike, however in all likelihood the grid would be damaged before it can transfer the power of the solar flare into homes (it would be a slow build up over time - hours and maybe days - until it cooks the transformers and other equipment designed to regulate power).

So Faraday cages and the like to protect from solar flare are, well, about as useful as tin foil hats. Main thing is to disconnect your house from the grid via your main breakers when we know CME strike is imminent (and of course we will know about many hours in advance).

Carrington event is not biggest possible.

[queazocotal]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/scien... - twice in the last thousand years or so, there has been an event around ten to twenty times larger, with a _much_ more energetic and destructive (to orbital things) spectrum.

Is preparation a problem

[Dereck1701]

From what I understand there is really only one preparation, which is the entire reason the Space Weather Prediction Center was created. To know that it's coming and be ready to shut down the grid. This isn't an EMP, it won't overly effect individual electrical systems (like a Hospital running on a generator). It really only effects large networks which have enough surface area to serve as a receiver for the energy of the storm. The biggest threat is operators not reacting fast enough, which would cause the grid voltage to increase to levels that it wasn't designed for which would cause transformers, generators and other control/generation systems to burn out. If that happened replacement of the burnt out systems would take years.

Re:Is preparation a problem

[iggymanz]

No, there is a better preparation, ground resistors for transformers so the grid doesn't even need to be shut down. Solved problem, just need to spend the money and do it; estimated cost by Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society was less than $200 million. chump change, cheap insurance.

Re:Is preparation a problem

[ClickOnThis]

This.

The electrical grids consist of cables that are strewn over long distances. They act like giant antennas that pick up the EM radiation from the flare and its interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. To protect the grid, you disconnect portions of it from each other, so that instead of a few giant "antennas", you have many more small ones. The current induced in the smaller "antennas" is much lower and far less harmful. And this is why prediction is so important: the early warning allows grid-operators to disconnect the grid in time to avoid catastrophic damage.

Satellites are also vulnerable because they can suffer deep static-charging that burns out electrical components. Unfortunately, forecasting doesn't help as much for this. The best you can do is study the magnitudes of expected events, engineer as well as you can against them, and plan for redundancy and replacement of the satellites as needed.

That's not a plan, that's a plan to plan

[Etcetera]

To be fair, there's not much incredibly unique about solar weather like this that wouldn't apply to a general electrical catastrophe from an intentional EMP. There's a chance of getting some notice notice, but the practical effects of that will be slim other than telling anyone with a Faraday Cage to close and everyone else to attempt to power everything down first.

Whether it's a rogue state exploding a few nukes in space over the US (no targetting needed, just fire it up from a shipping container at set it to explode about 100mi high), or the Sun taking it out, the end is the same... pretty complete collapse of infrastructure everywhere at once. Think Katrina, but simultaneously across the county. What infrastructure remains working probably won't stay functioning for long with all of the other issues going on...

The logistics of rebuilding will be immense and measured in years, and that's assuming we have enough working equipment after that to "reboot civilization", as it were, and some other -- better equipped -- country with a few working jets doesn't decide to take advantage of things. The military will have properly shielded equipment in many cases, but it's an open question how long and in what way a chain of command can survive when disconnection is universal and recovery is years away.

The rural areas will be survivable; the coastal cities and anywhere where survival depends on electricity and food transportation logistics will not be.

The book One Second After is a decent look at what it might be like, although I have faith that there will be more HAMs than he seems to think who might be able to help with long distance communication in the aftermath. Or you could just watch reruns of Revolution and ignore the mystical nanite techno-babble and focus on the sociology of the collapse.

1970s Solar Flare Telco Cable Crash

[billstewart]

I used to work at Bell Labs, in a department that had a bunch of nuclear physicists doing research into EMP, because the government wanted studies about hardening their networks in case of nuclear war, and a big thing that influenced them was a telco cable that crashed during a mid-1970s solar flare. It was back when long-haul cable systems were still copper, before fiber had replaced them, and a few hundred miles of copper wire becomes a very big antenna if you hit it with enough of a magnetic field, and there's enough voltage difference between it and ground to fry the equipment at both ends. They had a huge amount of data to work with, and they also studied the effects of EMP on various pieces of equipment, and ways to design the networks to be resilient against suddenly getting big holes in it.

Fiber optics helps with a lot of this (but obviously that doesn't help the electric companies.) On the other hand, during the 60s and 70s, the phone networks were changing from electromechanical phone switches like relays and crossbars, which were easy to protect, to transistors and integrated circuits that just aren't, and you're not going to put it all in Faraday cages, especially these days when there's no longer a Soviet Union that's likely to nuke the US. And the Bell System divestiture meant that a lot of the interconnections between local telco switches were no longer available to act as backups for the now-multiple long-distance companies, but the switching logic was starting to get smarter so there were more option for rerouting traffic than with the older dumber switches. Lots of change, and then all this Internet stuff happened.