8 ms·

Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

144 points by csaid81 6y ago

daenz 6y ago
This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > […] repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. There's a book (ISBN 978-0143127048): > Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch? > Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment? * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ Of course it's at layman's level of understanding, so further resources would be needed to get all the details.
  - daenz 6y ago
    This would be a great starting point for the repo. The goal would be to have this layman-level knowledge like this and then flesh out the extreme technical details by crowdsourcing verified experts. I'm especially interested in how to organize traumatized people in a productive way, since that will likely be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.
    - jdironman 6y ago
      Like a wikipedia, but condensed, useful, and navigable. Preferably able to store offline / locally or decentralized. Would have to identify what basis is necessary for rebuild and what is luxury. A large majority of things today are simply luxury. I love the idea of it though and would def try and contribute somehow even though my skill and knowledge base isnt comparable to others.
      - input_sh 6y ago
        Plenty of projects like that. Here's one: https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
      - marvin 6y ago
        An offline dump of Wikipedia would be a valuable addition to such a library. I've been thinking of storing something like this on a durable laptop stored in a Faraday cage, along with solar chargers and so on.
  - messe 6y ago
    > get metal out of rocks? I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. It's my understanding that there aren't many easily accessible metal deposits left, as there would have been thousands of years ago.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. Covered in the book: recycle first, especially early in the post-collapse world when there may be a lot of stuff just sitting around.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    Protip: order the paper version. I suspect having a working, charged Kindle may be difficult in the event the book is actually required.
- pronoiac 6y ago
  You might like Ryan North's "How to Invent Everything," the survival guide for the stranded time traveller: https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
- StrangeDoctor 6y ago
  A project in a similar vein https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/ https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...
- ramzeus 6y ago
  Wikipedia is a quite good repository of all sorts of information. You can always clone that at put it on your computer for offline viewing.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    You can also make a proper book[1] from a series of wikipedia articles (mixing and matching what you want) to generate a properly indexed book. Laser print that on acid-free archival quality paper, bind and put in a dark, dry place and it'll outlive us all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books
- jnurmine 6y ago
  If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either. Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books. Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.
  - skummetmaelk 6y ago
    Imagine that scene from Planet of the Apes where Gary Oldman powers up an old broken iPad. But instead of looking at pictures of his family he opens up a digital copy of "how to rebuild society after the end of the world".
  - m463 6y ago
    But although github is centralized, git is distributed. and tcp/ip was literally built for nuclear war. This would be like tech prepper paradise. We could sync our tech trees and rebuild!
    - jnurmine 6y ago
      Just because TCP/IP was made to be robust enough to survive holes in the network topology caused by nuclear bomb devastation, it doesn't really mean that TCP/IP networks would magically keep on working after a large-scale nuclear war. I mean, during a nuclear war, the networks would only need to stay working until a counterattack could be coordinated and launched. After that point, the devastation would be so large planetwide that I think any potential TCP/IP users roaming the irradiated wastelands looking for food while coughing up blood would have other things on their mind than network access in any case. For smaller scale events, sure, but while the networking design might be robustness-focused, there is still a huge amount of auxiliary stuff required, these need power and cooling, maintenance and administration, repairs, and so on. Some parts of the internet system might be robust and resilient, but the whole system certainly isn't.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  You can find a lot of good resources/ideas for this in the prepping community.
- aruggirello 6y ago
  I'd recommend you check out Kiwix [1], an app but also a decade-old effort to make portable, offline working wikipedia copies. Coupled with a decent phone/tablet and there you have it... Or maybe you're more inclined towards a "FM 21-76 US ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL" kind of project? [1] https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/
chahex 6y ago
A perfect time to bring out new energy source.
baybal2 6y ago
> EMP attacks... For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...
- eppp 6y ago
  An EMP attack would destroy the power grid, your modern electronics may survive but without anything to power them.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    If it's just the grid that's gone, generators are available - hell I have a mobile one sat in my driveway.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      That doesn't help you if you can't get the fuel for it. Most industrial facilities can't just run on generators. Data centers can in theory, but I somehow doubt those diesel delivery contracts would be fulfilled, and good luck calling around asking for alternatives when the phone networks go down.
- 01100011 6y ago
  Source? I don't think the MOV in your power strip, or the typical ESD protections are going to save you. There are also conventional EMPs to worry about. Also, you could probably just take out key points with carbon dust bombs like we did in Iraq War #1.
- aaron695 6y ago
  Pretty much, but there's no point explaining it to people. Not believing in nuclear weapons destroying everything with god like power is right wing. It doesn't even make sense, EMP's are nukes, someone just stared nuking you and you're worried about the EMP.
  - 6y ago
nayuki 6y ago
"Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass Ejections" by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo
- koheripbal 6y ago
  tldr: Nope.
  - csaid81 6y ago
    I think the answer is not "nope" but "probably nope". That video is perhaps overconfident in our ability to detect these storms. From the article: > One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the characteristics of severe storms, since they are so rare.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      Sometimes you get close enough to zero that for any reasonable application, the answer can be rounded to zero.
trinicoinmaster 6y ago
Solar storms are a greater threat to the satellite system we currently have. EMPs are over rated.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
The chances of an EMP attack Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP? A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so. Q: Why not? A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”. This is very wrong and just tells me we should be even more cautious due to it being a blind side. The defense industry has for over a decade had highly deployable, targetable, non-nuclear EMP. (ex1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU) If there is one thing I know, it's that the tools we develop for war in other places tend to end up being used back at home. So I would also disagree with the casual dismissal of the likelihood of use domestically. Further, part of the entire reasoning in natsec circles for the increasingly egregious violations of the constitution is because of the increase in ability for non nation-state actors to be able to perform in new types of asymmetric attacks, and I would say non-nuclear EMP would be just one in that list. The good news: I think most of these problems are solvable, and will assist us in being more ready to explore the extreme parts of our world and beyond. Making tempest and EMP shielding default in electronics manufacturing for example. It would also assist in reduction of the totalitarian surveillance regime... so I say lets all start talking about how to do shielding properly. There is a lot of misinformation out there about it. I do wonder though, how much of that misinformation is on purpose. Like encryption, at what point does the government decide to suppress a technology because it might hinder their power? Things to ponder.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  It seems like an EMP attack would be best bet against the US for an actor with a very limited number of nukes. From the field strength maps I've seen, a single large nuke (not sure if NK's nukes are large enough) would affect all of the US, two nukes and they could hit the coasts. Nuking a city destroys a city, destroying the electrical grid takes out most of a nations industrial production and forces them to focus on short-term survival. An EMP taking out the power grid across the US in a way that isn't quickly recovered from would likely be a lot more devastating - definitely in terms of industrial capacity, possibly also in human losses due to starvation and general collapse - than nuking two major cities with the same yield.
stickfigure 6y ago
I was a bit surprised by this exchange: Q: Should I be more worried about EMP Attacks or solar storms? A: Opinions differ. But the EMP Commission is more worried about EMP attacks. Q: Why? Here's where I expected the answer to be: A: Because it's the EMP Commission. It's right there in the name. The Solar Storm Commission is down the hall on the right. (I personally imagine it in the voice of John Cleese)
mywacaday 6y ago
The UK Sky drama COBRA deals with this scenario and the difficulty of getting replacement transformers after a solar flare
drtillberg 6y ago
I interpreted the report as: "There are 9 unguarded remote sites which, if damaged maliciously or accidentally, would lead to complete collapse of the U.S. as a nation." And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being discussed separately?[1] [1] https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-gri...
- noir_lord 6y ago
  It surprises me that physical attacks against infrastructure haven't been wider then they have.
  - mrlonglong 6y ago
    People have tried to destroy mobile phone masts in the mistaken (and deluded) belief that they cause Corona virus. Never under estimate people's stupidity.
- codingdave 6y ago
  I must have missed the "unguarded remote" part of the article. I read that there are 30 critical sites, any 9 of which would be a problem if taken out. To me, this sounds standard risk management. It sounds like a clear picture that it falls in the "Low Likelihood / High Impact" quadrant, though, which is the toughest quadrant to address, because you get into exactly the kinds of questions you alluded to - unlikely, generalized ideas of what could happen, but having to balance that with everyday operations which are absolutely going to happen. Even with a known mitigation of stockpiling resources to recover from such an event, at a price tag of $300M, there are many other things that money could go to. And while I'd like to feel safe knowing they have a solution ready, I don't know enough about the budgetary limits or what other programs would have to be reduced to make that $300M be available to give a solid personal opinion on any of this.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
bawana 6y ago
So does this mean that fewer if any people will suffer in rural underdeveloped areas like Africa and Asia?
dghughes 6y ago
Whenever I read about EMP it reminds me of an interesting device called an explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG). It generates an EMP using explosives but the blast is not the goal it's generating a massive electrical current (millions f amps in a microsecond). From what I can understand an EPFCG needs an explosive-driven ferromagnetic generator (EDFMG). I imagine the EDFMG is used like a fuse or blasting cap for the EPFCG. I'm not sure of the size of the devices. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/apjemp.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-driven_ferromagnetic_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-driven_ferromagnetic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...
sabujp 6y ago
i'm assuming this is now being discussed due to the recent kurzgesagt video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo . Key takeaways are that solar flame detectors are only 33% effective and we don't have a stockpile of enough transformers.
sabujp 6y ago
It seems to me we need massive localized solar and battery investments as a backup.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  I think the EMP situation can cause permanent damage to solar panels and batteries, even in off grid configs, though they would indeed help people who are out of the damage zone. Oh but most wargame EMP scenarios assume full blanketing of the USA with EMPs so no such zone will exist. Grid resilience is probably more appropriate in this case and is independent of generation technology.
Starwatcher2001 6y ago
If this subject interests you, I'd highly recommend the book "Sunfall" by Jim Al-Khalili. It's the physicist's first venture into fiction and is based around the threat of coronal mass ejections and a flipping of the Earths magnetic field. He also weaves hacking, encryption and other science themes into the plot. As you might expect from a theoretical physicist, it's based on solid science, with a small amount of poetic licence that he describes in the afterword. It's been described as "The Day After Tomorrow meets Neuromancer". Not sure I'd quite go that far, but it's a damn good read.
Seb-C 6y ago
So I am not an expert in this field, and actually I only have a vague idea in what a transformer does, but is there a reason to believe this would not be repairable? We are not talking about a usual bomb, so most of the materials and infrastructure would still be there. It would not make any sense to build a new one instead of repairing or replacing the damaged parts.

144 points by csaid81 6y ago

This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

throw0101a 6y ago
> […] repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. There's a book (ISBN 978-0143127048): > Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch? > Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment? * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/ Of course it's at layman's level of understanding, so further resources would be needed to get all the details.
- daenz 6y ago
  This would be a great starting point for the repo. The goal would be to have this layman-level knowledge like this and then flesh out the extreme technical details by crowdsourcing verified experts. I'm especially interested in how to organize traumatized people in a productive way, since that will likely be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.
  - jdironman 6y ago
    Like a wikipedia, but condensed, useful, and navigable. Preferably able to store offline / locally or decentralized. Would have to identify what basis is necessary for rebuild and what is luxury. A large majority of things today are simply luxury. I love the idea of it though and would def try and contribute somehow even though my skill and knowledge base isnt comparable to others.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      Plenty of projects like that. Here's one: https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
    - marvin 6y ago
      An offline dump of Wikipedia would be a valuable addition to such a library. I've been thinking of storing something like this on a durable laptop stored in a Faraday cage, along with solar chargers and so on.
- messe 6y ago
  > get metal out of rocks? I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. It's my understanding that there aren't many easily accessible metal deposits left, as there would have been thousands of years ago.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. Covered in the book: recycle first, especially early in the post-collapse world when there may be a lot of stuff just sitting around.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Protip: order the paper version. I suspect having a working, charged Kindle may be difficult in the event the book is actually required.
pronoiac 6y ago
You might like Ryan North's "How to Invent Everything," the survival guide for the stranded time traveller: https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
StrangeDoctor 6y ago
A project in a similar vein https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/ https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...
ramzeus 6y ago
Wikipedia is a quite good repository of all sorts of information. You can always clone that at put it on your computer for offline viewing.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  You can also make a proper book[1] from a series of wikipedia articles (mixing and matching what you want) to generate a properly indexed book. Laser print that on acid-free archival quality paper, bind and put in a dark, dry place and it'll outlive us all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books
jnurmine 6y ago
If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either. Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books. Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.
- skummetmaelk 6y ago
  Imagine that scene from Planet of the Apes where Gary Oldman powers up an old broken iPad. But instead of looking at pictures of his family he opens up a digital copy of "how to rebuild society after the end of the world".
- m463 6y ago
  But although github is centralized, git is distributed. and tcp/ip was literally built for nuclear war. This would be like tech prepper paradise. We could sync our tech trees and rebuild!
  - jnurmine 6y ago
    Just because TCP/IP was made to be robust enough to survive holes in the network topology caused by nuclear bomb devastation, it doesn't really mean that TCP/IP networks would magically keep on working after a large-scale nuclear war. I mean, during a nuclear war, the networks would only need to stay working until a counterattack could be coordinated and launched. After that point, the devastation would be so large planetwide that I think any potential TCP/IP users roaming the irradiated wastelands looking for food while coughing up blood would have other things on their mind than network access in any case. For smaller scale events, sure, but while the networking design might be robustness-focused, there is still a huge amount of auxiliary stuff required, these need power and cooling, maintenance and administration, repairs, and so on. Some parts of the internet system might be robust and resilient, but the whole system certainly isn't.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
You can find a lot of good resources/ideas for this in the prepping community.
aruggirello 6y ago
I'd recommend you check out Kiwix [1], an app but also a decade-old effort to make portable, offline working wikipedia copies. Coupled with a decent phone/tablet and there you have it... Or maybe you're more inclined towards a "FM 21-76 US ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL" kind of project? [1] https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/

chahex 6y ago

A perfect time to bring out new energy source.

baybal2 6y ago

> EMP attacks... For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...

eppp 6y ago
An EMP attack would destroy the power grid, your modern electronics may survive but without anything to power them.
- iso1210 6y ago
  If it's just the grid that's gone, generators are available - hell I have a mobile one sat in my driveway.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    That doesn't help you if you can't get the fuel for it. Most industrial facilities can't just run on generators. Data centers can in theory, but I somehow doubt those diesel delivery contracts would be fulfilled, and good luck calling around asking for alternatives when the phone networks go down.
01100011 6y ago
Source? I don't think the MOV in your power strip, or the typical ESD protections are going to save you. There are also conventional EMPs to worry about. Also, you could probably just take out key points with carbon dust bombs like we did in Iraq War #1.
aaron695 6y ago
Pretty much, but there's no point explaining it to people. Not believing in nuclear weapons destroying everything with god like power is right wing. It doesn't even make sense, EMP's are nukes, someone just stared nuking you and you're worried about the EMP.
- 6y ago

nayuki 6y ago

"Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass Ejections" by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo

koheripbal 6y ago
tldr: Nope.
- csaid81 6y ago
  I think the answer is not "nope" but "probably nope". That video is perhaps overconfident in our ability to detect these storms. From the article: > One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the characteristics of severe storms, since they are so rare.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Sometimes you get close enough to zero that for any reasonable application, the answer can be rounded to zero.

trinicoinmaster 6y ago

Solar storms are a greater threat to the satellite system we currently have. EMPs are over rated.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

The chances of an EMP attack Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP? A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so. Q: Why not? A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”. This is very wrong and just tells me we should be even more cautious due to it being a blind side. The defense industry has for over a decade had highly deployable, targetable, non-nuclear EMP. (ex1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU) If there is one thing I know, it's that the tools we develop for war in other places tend to end up being used back at home. So I would also disagree with the casual dismissal of the likelihood of use domestically. Further, part of the entire reasoning in natsec circles for the increasingly egregious violations of the constitution is because of the increase in ability for non nation-state actors to be able to perform in new types of asymmetric attacks, and I would say non-nuclear EMP would be just one in that list. The good news: I think most of these problems are solvable, and will assist us in being more ready to explore the extreme parts of our world and beyond. Making tempest and EMP shielding default in electronics manufacturing for example. It would also assist in reduction of the totalitarian surveillance regime... so I say lets all start talking about how to do shielding properly. There is a lot of misinformation out there about it. I do wonder though, how much of that misinformation is on purpose. Like encryption, at what point does the government decide to suppress a technology because it might hinder their power? Things to ponder.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
It seems like an EMP attack would be best bet against the US for an actor with a very limited number of nukes. From the field strength maps I've seen, a single large nuke (not sure if NK's nukes are large enough) would affect all of the US, two nukes and they could hit the coasts. Nuking a city destroys a city, destroying the electrical grid takes out most of a nations industrial production and forces them to focus on short-term survival. An EMP taking out the power grid across the US in a way that isn't quickly recovered from would likely be a lot more devastating - definitely in terms of industrial capacity, possibly also in human losses due to starvation and general collapse - than nuking two major cities with the same yield.

stickfigure 6y ago

I was a bit surprised by this exchange: Q: Should I be more worried about EMP Attacks or solar storms? A: Opinions differ. But the EMP Commission is more worried about EMP attacks. Q: Why? Here's where I expected the answer to be: A: Because it's the EMP Commission. It's right there in the name. The Solar Storm Commission is down the hall on the right. (I personally imagine it in the voice of John Cleese)

mywacaday 6y ago

The UK Sky drama COBRA deals with this scenario and the difficulty of getting replacement transformers after a solar flare

drtillberg 6y ago

I interpreted the report as: "There are 9 unguarded remote sites which, if damaged maliciously or accidentally, would lead to complete collapse of the U.S. as a nation." And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being discussed separately?[1] [1] https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-gri...

noir_lord 6y ago
It surprises me that physical attacks against infrastructure haven't been wider then they have.
- mrlonglong 6y ago
  People have tried to destroy mobile phone masts in the mistaken (and deluded) belief that they cause Corona virus. Never under estimate people's stupidity.
codingdave 6y ago
I must have missed the "unguarded remote" part of the article. I read that there are 30 critical sites, any 9 of which would be a problem if taken out. To me, this sounds standard risk management. It sounds like a clear picture that it falls in the "Low Likelihood / High Impact" quadrant, though, which is the toughest quadrant to address, because you get into exactly the kinds of questions you alluded to - unlikely, generalized ideas of what could happen, but having to balance that with everyday operations which are absolutely going to happen. Even with a known mitigation of stockpiling resources to recover from such an event, at a price tag of $300M, there are many other things that money could go to. And while I'd like to feel safe knowing they have a solution ready, I don't know enough about the budgetary limits or what other programs would have to be reduced to make that $300M be available to give a solid personal opinion on any of this.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

bawana 6y ago

So does this mean that fewer if any people will suffer in rural underdeveloped areas like Africa and Asia?

dghughes 6y ago

Whenever I read about EMP it reminds me of an interesting device called an explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG). It generates an EMP using explosives but the blast is not the goal it's generating a massive electrical current (millions f amps in a microsecond). From what I can understand an EPFCG needs an explosive-driven ferromagnetic generator (EDFMG). I imagine the EDFMG is used like a fuse or blasting cap for the EPFCG. I'm not sure of the size of the devices. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/apjemp.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-driven_ferromagnetic_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-driven_ferromagnetic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...

sabujp 6y ago

i'm assuming this is now being discussed due to the recent kurzgesagt video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo . Key takeaways are that solar flame detectors are only 33% effective and we don't have a stockpile of enough transformers.

sabujp 6y ago

It seems to me we need massive localized solar and battery investments as a backup.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
I think the EMP situation can cause permanent damage to solar panels and batteries, even in off grid configs, though they would indeed help people who are out of the damage zone. Oh but most wargame EMP scenarios assume full blanketing of the USA with EMPs so no such zone will exist. Grid resilience is probably more appropriate in this case and is independent of generation technology.

Starwatcher2001 6y ago

If this subject interests you, I'd highly recommend the book "Sunfall" by Jim Al-Khalili. It's the physicist's first venture into fiction and is based around the threat of coronal mass ejections and a flipping of the Earths magnetic field. He also weaves hacking, encryption and other science themes into the plot. As you might expect from a theoretical physicist, it's based on solid science, with a small amount of poetic licence that he describes in the afterword. It's been described as "The Day After Tomorrow meets Neuromancer". Not sure I'd quite go that far, but it's a damn good read.

Seb-C 6y ago

So I am not an expert in this field, and actually I only have a vague idea in what a transformer does, but is there a reason to believe this would not be repairable? We are not talking about a usual bomb, so most of the materials and infrastructure would still be there. It would not make any sense to build a new one instead of repairing or replacing the damaged parts.