What We Can Do About Massive Solar Flares 224
Reader resistant sends in an update to our discussion a month back on the possibility of violent space weather destroying power grids worldwide during the upcoming solar cycle. Wired is running an interview with Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End," and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech. The piece brings two new threads to the discussion: the recently discovered presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, magnifying our vulnerability, and possible steps we can take over the next few years to make the power grid more robust against solar flares and coronal mass ejections. There's also that whole Mayan 2012 thing. Quoting John Kapperman: "What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground connections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid. In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine. ...we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer. [In the US] there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. ... We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things."
Fairly small resistors (Score:5, Insightful)
The myans? (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on. Anything and everything this article has to say is now more-or-less worthless because of that bit.
Re:Act now! Avoid Doomsday! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, $150 million that the energy company executives can use to line their pockets, or to pay for something to prevent a disaster that might not really happen anyway but would cause damage that would be much more expensive to fix than prevent, and would cause utter chaos in the nation for an extended period of time.
There's only one outcome here. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna start outfitting my house like Chuck Heston's in The Omega Man.
~Philly
Re:Small and inexpensive resistors (Score:5, Insightful)
$40,000 and the size of a washing machine isn't exactly what you'd call small and inexpensive, certainly not compared to what most people would think of when you mention a resistor.
Well, the transformers to which they'd be attached are also a wee bit bigger than your average wall wart.
Time to put on my tinfoil hat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Small and inexpensive resistors (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, when you have several kiloamperes of current flowing in a circuit of several kilovolts (several megawatts of power), typical in a power grid, a resistor the size of a washing machine is actually rather small. Think of the sizes of the transformers that you see in power stations. I'm sure you know what they look like, and how big they are. The resistors most people think of are designed to deal with milliamperes of current over about 5 volts or so, milliwatts or at best watts of power. The washing-machine resistor has to deal with power levels a million to a billion times greater than that, and must have a size to match.
Re:There's only one solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There's only one solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, have you ever seen a female virgin paladin riding a winged unicorn who DOESN'T look hot in a chainmail bikini?
Re:There's only one solution (Score:3, Insightful)