So more on the Sun: Solar flare/CME The effect of solar weather upon electrical system is something that people have known about since even before the nation’s electrical grid was built. Back in 1859, telegraph systems in the U.S. and Europe abruptly failed after a large solar flare called the Carrington Event (after astronomer Richard Carrington, who documented it). But the first really clear-cut warning came in 1989, when a moderate-intensity solar storm caused northeastern Canada’s Hydro-Quebec generating station to fail, leaving millions of people without electricity for nine hours, according to a National Research Council report. channel.nationalgeographic/channel/american-blackout/articles/solar-flare/ EMP : would not come from the Sun, Sorry if I confused anyone by putting it in the last post. But here is info on what an EMP is, and it actually is a valid threat. There is a whole National Geographic movie on the 27th about it. a burst of radiation that would interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere—including the ionosphere, the thin upper layer filled with free electrons, which facilitates radio communications. As a result, a powerful electrical current would radiate down to the Earth and create additional currents that would course through man-made electrical circuits as well. Electrical infrastructure and electronic devices would receive severe shocks, causing severe, widespread damage. A federal commission of scientific and military experts convened by Congress in 2004 warned that an EMP attack could cause a massive blackout that would affect phone systems, electric power transmission, factories the financial system, and transportation. “Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result,” the commission warned. “In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our Nation.” The commission noted that “the longer the outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery will be. Our vulnerability to EMP attack was first discovered back in 1962, during a military exercise, Starfish Prime, in which a missile containing a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead was detonated at a height of 248 miles over a remote area in the Pacific Ocean The blast had an unexpected effect, disrupting radio transmission as far away as California and Australia for several hours. It also damaged and ultimately disabled at least six orbiting satellites--including Telstar I, the satellite that transmitted the first live TV broadcasts from the U.S. to Europe and back again. U.S. officials didn’t bother to develop any defenses against the EMP during the Cold War, because they assumed that the threat of a retaliatory nuclear attack was sufficient. Since then, however, new menaces have emerged—rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups, whose volatile leaders might not be as easily deterred. To make matters worse, today’s U.S. is far more dependent upon electronic gadgetry than it was 50 years ago. channel.nationalgeographic/channel/american-blackout/articles/emp-attack/ More info coming up!
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 18:31:14 +0000
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