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- even motorized vehicles that aren't damaged will be impacted by the lack of functioning fuel stations as gasoline stops flowing to and from the pumps. With regular deliveries interrupted by the lack of fuel and power, major urban populations will confront empty grocery shelves and a complete breakdown in essential services — from firefighting to garbage collection — in a matter of days.
Whee.
francopoli · 57 days ago · link ·
Anything bit enough to deliver a viable EMP is going to vaporize you and set fire to anything that survives, then it's not your problem any more. If you want to go into the "OH SHIT THIS IS SCARY" realm, with something that may actually happen? CMEs happen every dozen years or so and we are just lucky that none have faced the earth.
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I guess my understanding of the physics is faulty. My understanding is that ever CME has an EMP as a sub-element in the event. The severity of the CME increases the severity of the corresponding EMP. I guess I'd always seen EMPs as analogous to shockwaves: Every explosion has a shockwave, just some of them are more devastating than others, depending on attributes of the explosion.
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francopoli · 54 days ago · link ·
The problem with a CME, of sufficient size, is that it will dump so much electrical energy into the earth's natural "ground state" aka the green wire that you will end up with the effect of everything shorting to ground. The 1859 Carrington Event shorted out telegraph lines, exploded batteries and dumped enough energy into the infant electrical grid that they removed all the power sources and used the electrical flow of the event to power everything for about a week. Don't think of it as a shockwave, instead think of it as running 50,000 amps through a 12 gauge wire. Where Cletus shorted the ground to the hot leads. Now, imaging the same level of energy input but this time you have a trillion dollars worth of very intricate transformers, power stations, long distance high tension lines and nowhere to dump the extra energy and not enough time to shut everything down. Each of the super transformers, we are talking boxes like these things are custom jobs and they don't have extras lying around. One goes boom and they make a new one. Normally, you get electrical trouble on the grid, you short to ground and then fix the break. Now, imaging THERE IS NO GROUND and shorting to ground increases the flow into the system. Now you have thousands of very expensive, hard to replace intricate high tech devices to replace, each one taking 1-3 months to make and a month to transport. Oh, and the factories that make these things? No power. The materials processing factories? No Power. And the ships, trains etc? No power. And with "Just In Time" logistics, everyone has 3-5 days of supply on hand, if that. Then, the water systems start to fail, refrigerated food stocks start to go bad and the supermarkets are empty. Maybe you could sever the grid and save some of the power distribution if you had 3-4 days warning. Nuke plants need time to shut down. You just cannot flip a switch and turn off a coal burning plant. And the 2012 CME made it to the earth's orbit in less than 20 hours. Our electrical grid in the US is shit; it's 40 years old and held together by hopes and good feelings. It needs a near full upgrade so that we can push hard for non-fossil fuel power sources. It also needs to be modernized so that things like the 1989 Quebec Outage and the recent Northeast US Power Cascade can't happen. But that requires lots of money and a functional government.
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Fascinating. And I get it now; I was using "EMP" for shorthand of the electrical damage caused by a CME, and that's not right. (Cletus and his ground wire.) I knew about the fragility of our power grid (went deeply into the research behind switching to a solar install career, about 10 years ago) and that Mother Nature has some infrequently used tools in the shop that could shred our infrastructure... and that was before JIT manufacturing, overnight shipping as a norm, and electric fleet vehicles... Yikes.
EMPs are bullshit. Friend's dad was part of a group that experimented with neutron bombs. We used to talk about things seventeen year olds shouldn't talk about. Said "yeah, it's pretty easy to lean a reaction towards ionizing radiation but it's still a nuke." And really, if you're going to nuke something, nuke something. The advent of MIRVs meant that the goal wasn't bigger nukes, wasn't fancier nukes, but was smaller nukes that you could loft more of. Nuclear posturing by everyone with nukes has been about "enough that they can't be stopped" pretty much since the Manhattan Project (fun fact - if the war had gone on another couple months we would have had five atomic bombs to drop). I asked him about EMPs. He looked at me like I was an idiot. Everything you know to be "EMP" is actually orbiting radiation that kills electronics because fallout in orbit doesn't fall. If you would like to avoid the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, avoid nuclear shooting wars. Because lemme tell ya - the occasional frizzle of a circuitboard here or there is nothin' compared to a 100kT airburst.