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Preventing Armageddon Would Cost Only $100 Million … But Congress Is Too Thick to Approve the Fix
The government has thrown tens of trillions of dollars at the big banks, even though bailing out the big banks hurts – rather than helps – the American economy. See this, this and this. (And it doesn’t take a PhD economist to guess that using bailout funds to buy gold toilet seats and prostitutes is probably not the best way to stimulate the economy as a whole)..
Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz says that the $3-5 trillion spent on the Iraq war alone has been very bad for the American economy. See this, this and this. Security experts – including both hawks and doves – agree that waging war against Iraq and in other Middle Eastern countries weakens national security and increases terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
The government has thrown money at all sorts of other useless projects.
And yet Congress refuses to spend a mere $100 million to prevent Armageddon.
Specifically, well-known physicist Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society asked Congress to appropriate $100 million to harden the country’s electrical grid against solar flares.
Congress refused.
Kaku explains that a solar flare like the one that hit the U.S. in 1859 would – in the current era of nuclear power and electric refrigeration – cause Armageddon.
Not only could such a flare bring on multiple Fukushima type accidents, but it could well cause food riots nationwide.
Kaku explains that relief came in for people hit by disasters like Katrina or Sandy from the “outside”. But a large solar flare could knock out a lot of the power nationwide. So – as people’s food spoils due to lack of refrigeration – emergency workers from other areas would be too preoccupied with their own local crisis to help. There would, in short, be no “cavalry” to the rescue in much of the country.
Such an event would be the most likely Armageddon-type event to hit us (from a secular source, anyway … remember, the Mayans aren’t predicting the end of the world this year.)
In addition, we’ve spent tens of trillions on the “war on terror”, but have failed to take steps to protect against the largest terrorist threat of all: an attack on the power supplies to nuclear power plants. As discussed in more detail below, an electromagnetic pulse (emp) which took out the power supply to a nuclear power plant would cause a Fukushima-style meltdown, and spent fuel pools are extremely vulnerable to terrorism.
We’ve sounded the alarm for years about the failure to harden our electrical system against electromagnetic storms from our sun.
For example, we noted last year that the extreme vulnerability of nuclear power plants to solar flares is a very real threat which we must address:
Nasa scientists are predicting that a solar storm will knock out most of the electrical power grid in many countries worldwide, perhaps for months. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
Indeed, the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the sun’s most violent radiation, and yet the magnetic field fluctuates over time. As the Telegraph reported in 2008:
Large hole in magnetic field that protects Earth from sun’s rays … Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun’s violent blasts.
I’m not predicting some 2012 Mayan catastrophe. [Indeed, I think the whole Mayan 2012 thing is fake.] I am simply warning that a large solar storm – as Nasa is predicting – could knock out power throughout much of the world, especially if the earth’s magnetic field happens to be weak at the time.
What would happen to nuclear power plants world wide if their power – and most of the surrounding modern infrastructure – is knocked out?
Nuclear power companies are notoriously cheap in trying to cut costs. If they are failing to harden their electrical components to protect against the predicted solar storm, they are asking for trouble … perhaps on a scale that dwarfs Fukushima. Because while Fukushima is the first nuclear accident to involve multiple reactors within the same complex, a large solar storm could cause accidents at multiple complexes in numerous countries.
If the nuclear power companies and governments continue to cut costs and take large gambles, the next nuclear accident could make Fukushima look tame.
I’m not saying this will happen in 2012, or 2013 (although Nasa appears to be hinting at this). But a large solar storm which knocks out electrical grids over wide portions of the planet will happen at some point in the future.
Don’t pretend it is unforeseeable. The nuclear power industry is on notice that it must spend the relatively small amounts of money necessary to prevent a widespread meltdown from the loss of power due to a solar storm.
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Most current reactors are of a similarly outdated design as the Fukushima reactors, where the cooling systems require electricity to operate, and huge amounts of spent radioactive fuel are housed on-site, requiring continuous cooling to prevent radioactive release. [Designs which would automatically shut down - and cool down - in the event of an accident are ignored for political reasons.]
The conservative G2 Bulletin reported earlier this year:
As scientists warn of an impending solar storm between now and 2014 that could collapse the national power grid, thrusting millions into darkness instantly, a debate has flared up between utilities and the federal government on the severity of such an event.
NASA and the National Academy of Sciences previously confirmed to G2Bulletin that an electromagnetic pulse event from an intense solar storm could occur any time between now and 2014.
They say it could have the effect of frying electronics and knocking out transformers in the national electric grid system.
Already, there are separate published reports of massive solar storms of plasma – some as large as the Earth itself – flaring off of the sun’s surface and shooting out into space, with some recently having come close enough to Earth to affect worldwide communications and alter the flights of commercial aircraft near the North Pole.
But in February, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which represents the power industry, issued a stunning report asserting that a worst-case geomagnetic “super storm” like the 1859 Carrington Event likely wouldn’t damage most power grid transformers. Instead, it would cause voltage instability and possibly result in blackouts lasting only a few hours or days, but not months and years.
NERC’s assertion, however, is at serious variance with the 2008 congressional EMP Commission, the 2008 National Academy of Sciences report; a 2010 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report; the 2012 report by the Defense Committee of the British Parliament, and others.
Even the British scientists who contributed to the parliament report came to their own independent assessment that a great geomagnetic storm would cause widespread damage to power grid transformers and result in a protracted blackout lasting months, or even years, with catastrophic consequences for society.
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[The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or "FERC"], which regulates interstate electricity and other energy sales but has no authority now over local utilities to harden their grid sites, says that as many as 130 million Americans could have problems for years.
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U.S. transformers on the average are more than 30 years old and are susceptible to internal heating, according to FERC experts.
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There is ample evidence in the possession of the FERC revealing the damage to transformers from previous geomagnetic storms. For example, there was serious transformer damage to the Salem nuclear power plant in New Jersey in the aftermath of the same geomagnetic storm that caused the March 1989 Hydro-Quebec blackout.
There’s An Easy Fix … Are We Smart Enough to Take It?
Japan’s nuclear meltdown, the economic crisis and the Gulf oil spill all happened for the same reason: big companies cutting every corner in the book – and hiding the existence of huge risks – in order to make a little money.
There are relatively easy fixes to the threat from solar flares:
The head of the leading consulting firm on the effect of electromagnetic disruptions on our power grid – which was commissioned to study the issue by the U.S. federal government – stated that it would be relatively inexpensive to reduce the vulnerability of our power grid:
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.
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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.
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If you’re talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year. We’re talking about $150 million or so. It’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
Mechanical engineer Matthew Stein [notes]:
There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more being planned or under construction…. Imagine what havoc it would wreak on our civilization and the planet’s ecosystems if we were to suddenly witness not just one or two nuclear meltdowns, but 400 or more! How likely is it that our world might experience an event that could ultimately cause hundreds of reactors to fail and melt down at approximately the same time? I venture to say that, unless we take significant protective measures, this apocalyptic scenario is not only possible, but probable.
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In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck by roughly 100 solar storms, causing significant geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), two of which were powerful enough to rank as “extreme GMDs.” If an extreme GMD of such magnitude were to occur today, in all likelihood, it would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at the vast majority of our world’s nuclear reactors, similar to but over 100 times worse than, the disasters at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
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The good news is that relatively affordable equipment and processes could be installed to protect critical components in the electric power grid and its nuclear reactors, thereby averting this “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” scenario. The bad news is that even though panels of scientists and engineers have studied the problem, and the bipartisan Congressional electromagnetic pulse (EMP) commission has presented a list of specific recommendations to Congress, our leaders have yet to approve and implement any significant preventative measures.
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Unfortunately, the world’s nuclear power plants, as they are currently designed, are critically dependent upon maintaining connection to a functioning electrical grid, for all but relatively short periods of electrical blackouts, in order to keep their reactor cores continuously cooled so as to avoid catastrophic reactor core meltdowns and fires in storage ponds for spent fuel rods.
If an extreme GMD were to cause widespread grid collapse (which it most certainly will), in as little as one or two hours after each nuclear reactor facility’s backup generators either fail to start, or run out of fuel, the reactor cores will start to melt down. After a few days without electricity to run the cooling system pumps, the water bath covering the spent fuel rods stored in “spent-fuel ponds” will boil away, allowing the stored fuel rods to melt down and burn[2]. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) currently mandates that only one week’s supply of backup generator fuel needs to be stored at each reactor site, it is likely that, after we witness the spectacular nighttime celestial light show from the next extreme GMD, we will have about one week in which to prepare ourselves for Armageddon.
To do nothing is to behave like ostriches with our heads in the sand, blindly believing that “everything will be okay” as our world drifts towards the next natural, inevitable super solar storm and resultant extreme GMD. Such a storm would end the industrialized world as we know it, creating almost incalculable suffering, death and environmental destruction on a scale not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
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There are records from the 1850s to today of roughly 100 significant geomagnetic solar storms, two of which, in the last 25 years, were strong enough to cause millions of dollars worth of damage to key components that keep our modern grid powered.
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“The Carrington Event,” raged from August 28 to September 4, 1859. This extreme GMD induced currents so powerful that telegraph lines, towers and stations caught on fire at a number of locations around the world. Best estimates are that the Carrington Event was approximately 50 percent stronger than the 1921 storm.[5] Since we are headed into an active solar period much like the one preceding the Carrington Event, scientists are concerned that conditions could be ripe for the next extreme GMD.[6]
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The federal government recently sponsored a detailed scientific study to better understand how much critical components of our national electrical power grid might be affected by either a naturally occurring GMD or a man-made EMP. Under the auspices of the EMP Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and reviewed in depth by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Academy of Sciences, Metatech Corporation undertook extensive modeling and analysis of the potential effects of extreme geomagnetic storms on the US electrical power grid. Based upon a storm as intense as the 1921 storm, Metatech estimated that within the United States, induced voltage and current spikes, combined with harmonic anomalies, would severely damage or destroy over 350 EHV power transformers critical to the functioning of the US grid and possibly impact well over 2000 EHV transformers worldwide.[7]
EHV transformers are made to order and custom-designed for each installation, each weighing as much as 300 tons and costing well over $1 million. Given that there is currently a three-year waiting list for a single EHV transformer (due to recent demand from China and India, lead times grew from one to three years), and that the total global manufacturing capacity is roughly 100 EHV transformers per year when the world’s manufacturing centers are functioning properly, you can begin to grasp the implications of widespread transformer losses.
The loss of thousands of EHV transformers worldwide would cause a catastrophic grid collapse across much of the industrialized world. It will take years, at best, for the industrialized world to put itself back together after such an event, especially considering the fact that most of the manufacturing centers that make this equipment will also be grappling with widespread grid failure.
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In the event of an extreme GMD-induced long-term grid collapse covering much of the globe, if just half of the world’s spent fuel ponds were to boil off their water and become radioactive, zirconium-fed infernos, the ensuing contamination could far exceed the cumulative effect of 400 Chernobyls.
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The Congressionally mandated EMP Commission has studied the threat of both EMP [i.e. an electromagnetic pulse set of by terrorists or adversaries in war] and extreme GMD events and made recommendations to the US Congress to implement protective devices and procedures to ensure the survival of the grid and other critical infrastructures in either event. John Kappenman, author of the Metatech study, estimates that it would cost about $1 billion to build special protective devices into the US grid to protect its EHV transformers from EMP or extreme GMD damage and to build stores of critical replacement parts should some of these items be damaged or destroyed. Kappenman estimates that it would cost significantly less than $1 billion to store at least a year’s worth of diesel fuel for backup generators at each US nuclear facility and to store sets of critical spare parts, such as backup generators, inside EMP-hardened steel containers to be available for quick change-out in the event that any of these items were damaged by an EMP or GMD.[12]
For the cost of a single B-2 bomber or a tiny fraction of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout, we could invest in preventative measures to avert what might well become the end of life as we know it. There is no way to protect against all possible effects from an extreme GMD or an EMP attack, but we could implement measures to protect against the worst effects. Since 2008, Congress has narrowly failed to pass legislation that would implement at least some of the EMP Commission’s recommendations.[13]
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Citizens can do their part to push for legislation to move toward this goal and work inside our homes and communities to develop local resilience and self reliance, so that in the event of a long-term grid-down scenario, we might make the most of a bad situation. The same tools that are espoused by the Transition movement for developing local self-reliance and resilience to help cope with the twin effects of climate change and peak oil could also serve communities well in the event of an EMP attack or extreme GMD. If our country were to implement safeguards to protect our grid and nuclear power plants from EMP, it would also eliminate the primary incentive for a terrorist to launch an EMP attack. The sooner we take these actions, the less chance that an EMP attack will occur.
Will we insist that these inexpensive fixes to our electrical grid be made? Or will we focus on over-blown dangers … and ignore the thing most likely to actually get us?
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Transformers fail every day. Then, they replace them.
This is some major event?
It's a recession if your neighbor loses his/her job. It's a depression if YOU lose your job.
Imagine SEVERAL of these things going all at the same time. How long will it be before YOUR transformer is replaced? How long will that food in your fridge freezer last? How about in the nearby store? What about fresh water systems? Heating or cooling for your dwelling?
It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN.
No, we cannot avert adding more "protection" to a system that WILL fail in hopes of keeping it from failing. I'd think that people could see where this is leading- it's a reversing course, not a forwarding one. Simpler, smaller systems are our future.
The big ones that make the backbone power grids function are special order, from the other side of the planet. Several years wait list. How about that?
And how about ALL the transformers, even the smaller ones that step down to serve your house, ALL going up in flames, all at once?
What do you suppose in the global production capacity, versus an instant demand for enough transformers to reestablish the entire power grid of the world's number one economy?
Would these suppliers take the dollar at that point, based on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, which will not have any computers running anymore, no mail system, no employees coming to work because there is no way to pay them, no way for their pay to be exchanged for that perishable "food" stuff, that comes from that supply chain thingy that used to exist?
special order, from the other side of the planet. Several years wait list.
And you know all of this how?
Now's the time to provide data to support your rebuttal, don't ya think?
Where do US power companies get their transformers?
What happens if the manufacturer itself gets hit? Keep in mind that humans have to manage to get to the production facilities to operate machines: are those humans fed? are they capable of traveling to the plant?
Two-dimensional thinking is a bad thing... maybe that's why you're getting a lot of red?
Read the report: http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf and consider not commenting on things you have not even done your first page Google research on.
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The effort for fail-safing the Grid would have to be virtually worldwide. It would not take that many simultaneous Fukushimas to put an end to the human race, directly and indirectly through associated chaos. So the U.S. could have everything in order for a Carrington Event and still end up in the same place as the rest of the world, (in a state of dying).
And prepping measures, short of a fully stocked underground bunker that could shield you from radioactivity for years, would only buy you a little time at most. It would most likely be death by your fellow human beings or death by rads in short order even if well-prepared.
Prepping is still good to do, but probably only a palliative in this extreme case.
Nuke plant meltdowns would be the least of our worries, for most of us, but it is good that people think about what happened at Fukushima and scenario out EMP and Solar Mass Ejection events and so forth, sure.
Whether solar or man-made, enough has been said that denial is foolish. When the power to spent fuel ponds goes, we will have only a little time to regret our foolishness. This issue was probably discussed in a "not for public distribution" appendix to this report. http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf . Go ahead, laugh at Doomsday Preppers all you want. We are glad you are enjoying your remaining time.
This is just one of a wide range of geological, disease, weather events that could do in the human race for good. The one I fear the most is Flu. We have so many varieties that the threat is limitless, and the outcome shocking certain - fatal to most young and old, and not good for the mid aged.
We do have the National Center for Disease Control, but they seem to be a little backward, bureaucratic, and did I mention bureaucratic?.
Influenza doesn't have a 25,000 year half-life, like P239.
I don't lose much sleep over solar flares, particularly now that we can see them coming in advance and (supposedly) voluntarily black-out as a preventative measure before arrival (yeah, yeah, I know). See: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-system-could-predict...
Still, the topic of this article does represent yet another example of just how out of touch "economists" are with what an economy really is. If TPTB were not all lawyers, bankers and economists, maybe if they had formal training in physics, they might realize that electricity (and the fuel that produces it), is infinitely more important than credit created from thin air.
George...!!!!! What about HAARP's electromagnetic crimes...? Lets talk Georgie Pordgie.
What about S.A.G...???
Tell us all about it George.
Human systems WILL ALL FAIL. The sun, as far as human time goes, isn't going to fail.
I'm agnostic about HAARP and chemtrails. Though such things aren't likely in favor of the average person they're still the least of our worries: minimize electrical dependencies; chemtrails, based on the notion of complete failure of chemical warfare to be controllable, isn't anything that is likely to have as much total impact.
It's all about risk assessment. Spending time on things that you have little control/impact on isn't a good use of time. But... that's why there's evolution: those doing a better job of managing risk will be the ones (and or their genes) that will travel further into the future.
I've got to figure out how to make my own EMP gun.
[Ralpie] You'll shoot your eye out! (tis the season to start thinking about this one again :-) )
You'll need some plutonium(lots of it has been manufactured these last six decades), or if you are a turd world basketcase retard psychostate who can't come up with some black market plutonium, you can go the u-235 route. A long haul to get together a bomb organized to maximize the gamma ray output in particular. Then you need a decent ICBM, anyway a pretty damned serious launcher, to get the thing above Nebraska about 300 miles up. Ideally you'd launch from a crappy freighter or something similar, so that your own country doesn't get vaporized by what remains of the USA's military still operational and communicating, which is to say its motherfucking mean strategic missile submarine fleet, with MIRVed thermonuclear warheads ready to fly 24/7.
Sounds workable! Anyone game? </sarc>
I sure wonder what the tax payers bill is for the chemtrail spraying that is being done to them.???
It can not be cheap.
There may be a sale going on...
If you're paying attention to the [actual] thread you'd catch that maybe you'd want to root for solar flares and EMPs. Reason being is that all the electronic transfer of funding is likely going to halt, and -PRESTO!- your worrisome chemtrail funding dries up, problem solved! Do YOU have a better solution to what you see as a problem?
those taxpayers are so worthless that they can barely make the interest paymets. Good thing we donT have to rely on taxpayers to fund anything! The Fed allows us to have a lot more "nice programs", than if we just had to rely on tax funding.
"Taxpayers" are hooked into the MATRIX via working for corporations that are linked in to the MATRIX. TPTB don't care about electronic bits flying around, they care about people making shit like drones so that TPTB can "protect" themselves from those making the drones...
GW, excuse me if I take your concern for solar flares from a different angle.
Rather than crusade for Govt to take mass collectivist action why not crusade for individuals to take their own action.
Detail the risk of a solar flare effecting their lives and what is the likely incidence/time (ie. will it happen on average every 50 years or 500 years) and then give a cost/benenfit analysis. Namely cost of fitting a back-up diesel generator to their house or apartment building.
The State, like its Justice system, prevents nothing GW. You should know seeing it trample all over Da Constitution. Or the recent drenching of New York because of its pitiful sea defences.
If you want to protect society appeal to society, not the cancerous dumb institution of parasites who solely serve themselves at societies expense. Does that make some sense GW?
In the "old" days, as many here remember, before switching (solid-state) power supplies, stuff had big, giant, heavy transformers in them. A lightning hit would generate a huge counter EMF and thus save most of your circuits. You might have had to replace the Xformer and filter caps. Man, back then, the diodes in the bridge were Huge.
I suggest everyone get GOOD UPS's for your stuff. I run everything in the house on them and have xtra gounding on the house itself.
Easy to do, not super-expensive, and you will save a lot of money unless you take a HUGE HIT, in which case you are f*cked anyway.
Zero Govt you're 100% right - if you need electricty, make your own, don't rely on the State - 2 hours of youTube investigations on how to build a solar generator and $2k will get you a bang-up 2,000W system. And if you build it yourself, you'll know how to fix it if something goes down. Layer the controller box with metal window screening and heavy mil plastic for (some) EMP/CME protection AND/OR store back up parts in a Faraday cage.
But if you've read "Pulse" or "One Second After" or "Lights Out", it won't be the lack of electricy that will be the problem, diseases will.
Look on YouTube for Patriot Nurse to learn about what meds to stock - fish antibiotics work just as well for us, no prescription needed and costs less - rotate/discard old stocks.
And if you're a capitalist, these 2 items may be worth considering in a SHTF scenario: (1) pool shock to make chlorine bleach and/or (2) tampons (normal use and gunshot wounds)
Semper Paratus
The backup generator, and all the connected electrical devices in your house would be worthless without spark gap arrestors (or something more sophisticated) on the house's connection to the grid. For every 1000 residences or small buildings with backup diesel generators in service, how many are properly protected from the world's largest antenna (electrical grid) taking a giant shit on them?
I had a absolutely horrific experience (both with materials sourcing & with the electrical inspectors) simply implementing redundant generators at my US house (NG primary, diesel backup). The common methodologies (not to mention the costs) used in commercial-scale solutions wasn't any help, as data centers tend to deploy vast quantities of automatic transfers switches, and hospitals use redundant wiring and outlets (both of which will fail miserably if the main service is not protected from overload).this
The costs on the consumer side are much higher than simply installing diesel generators, and the costs on the producer side are several zero's more this sales job for $100 million in more wantonly wasteful Washington pork.
Faraday cage. Drag the generator out once a month, run it for 15 minutes under load, do any maintenance, then seal it back in the faraday cage. After an EMP or Carrington event, don't actually use your generator until the die-off is mostly done, say a year later, maybe longer. For fuel storage, gasoline with ethanol in it is a poor choice. A giant underground propane tank might do you for a while, as propane doesn't go bad, and underground possibly raiders and govt and so on would not come to know about it. Your neighbors should not know you have a generator. Tell em its a compressor, or whatever.
"For fuel storage, gasoline with ethanol in it is a poor choice. "
There are fuel stabilizers that one could use. I have no idea how long these are good for though. 76 distributors are, I believe, ethanol free: the one where I get my diesel from, a truck stop, says they are ethanol free (I buy it for my power equipment).
I'm not certain that I'd want to live down in the ground with a big propane tank.
"Your neighbors should not know you have a generator. Tell em its a compressor, or whatever."
So they then come over to borrow/use your compressor, then what do you tell them? Part sarcasm, but... I think it better to be honest with your neighbors: if you manage to forget one KEY thing, which would result in extreme hardship, it would be nice to know that your neighbor could bail you out. Advertising PMs, on the other hand, isn't something that I'd share.
I'm out in the rural countryside, anyone who makes it out here in such an event is hardy enough to work with/alongside me... And, yes, there will be raiders, but if one is low key one can reduce the risk of being a target: you don't have to outrun the bear, just the person that you're with- if there's lots of better targets around then you'll be better off (I've got a bunch of wealthier horse people around, they'll be the lightening rods, bless them).
Thanks for the reply GW
My point is simply don't use Govt as your default go-too problem solver. Not only is Govt the most incompetent problem solver in society but always the most expensive solution as well.
If there's a problem sideline this expensive institutional village idiot and go straight to society
Regards nuclear power stations, well there's another expensive Govt mistake which like Fukinshambles in Japan is waiting for the problem to be compounded into a tragic mistake... only private solution, move out of the area if the risk is high
There are three distinct parts to the larger problem- 1) isolation and protection of power generation 2) protection of power distribution and 3) isolation and protection of power consumption.
The electrical engineers will have some quibbles with my oversimplification, but here goes (since we all will have to pay for the consequences of the current situation):
1) Nuke plants are complex because they MUST not fail or lose power for critical processes. So all the critical equipment within the facility must be shielded (more complex than the Faraday cage mentioned below) and the connection between the facility and the grid MUST prevent any backfeed (electrical surge coming from the grid to the power plant- backwards flow from normal). ZERO room for error, else Fukushima! Part Deux...
Non Nuke plants have the same imperatives, but with SOME tolerance for failure, and the existing grid is designed to function with entire plants being off-line for various reasons.
2) This is the only area addressed by the proposed $100M boondoggle, which doesn't even address point 1 above. It won't work, at all, or as advertised. The problem I described at my house was one of Load Isolation (basically really bad things would happen to my refrigerator if both the city power and one of the generators were simultaneous pumping electricity to its outlet). $100M buys a more sophisticated ground (the 3rd prong on an electrical plug, but a far cry from the surge suppressor that protects your iCrap), but it does nothing to isolate the expensive & hard to replace parts from and EMP/GMD because the grid itself becomes a second feed so there is both a surge on the "input" side of the transformer and a backfeed on the "output" side of the transformer.
3) If home and business owners don't have additional isolation protection installed then all their Internet/iCrap, refrigeration, heating/cooling, lighting etc. will need to be replaced, irrespective of whether the government-regulated "grid" remains intact.
In short, society needs 1,2, and 3 all functioning in order to maintain the status quo. IF there is an event, and if EITHER the regulators or you don't do your part, then YOU are fucked, regardless of who dropped the ball. Even if both you and the regulators do your parts, and something goes on the part of multiple nuclear power providers ANYWHERE in the world (and outside the control of the US Congress and regulators), WE ARE ALL FUCKED.
Refreshing to see someone rise above two-dimensional thinking!
We cannot eliminate risk: the recent financial disaster should tell us as much. Creating ever-bigger systems only means increasing risk.
Looks like we either choose to keep pushing forward, in which case the "end" will likely be some fiery inferno; OR, we end up huddled and freezing to death (those further away from the equator). I heard that death by freezing is supposed to be less painful, though I don't want to volunteer to find out: further, the phrase is "cold, dead hands," not "hot/melted, dead hands" :-)
ZG: I cannot argue with your logic. When I write a long piece such as this one, I can only cover so many angles at once.
In a monopoly situation where one utility provides power to everyone in a given region, free market economics are less likely to occur. If you don't like their prices, you can go ... where?
You're own generator: absoLUTEly!
But that won't protect the nuclear power plant down the road.
But if there is a free market way to make this happen, I am ALL for it!
A long time ago I had a coworker/friend who expressed concerns over his neighbor re-wiring his home. Apparently the neighbor wasn't exactly an electrician, didn't exhibit electrical prowess. Since this was a suburban environment (close proximity to neighbors) his neighbor's actions DID introduce an elevated risk to my coworker/friend. Fire tends to jump...
NOTE: I think about an increase in solar energy folks and or folks stocking up with generators and fuel and, in my mind, I start seeing a whole lot more fires happening... insurance companies have to a bit nervous as well (I suspect that they, masters of risk assessment that they are, tend to push for grid-based solutions).
Sometimes we overlook the fact that we're really all sailing on one big ship.
And while ZERO GOVT is anti-collective he/she fails to get the point that the things that he/she is resting upon (such as generators) is the result of collective-ness. It's a big Whack-a-Mole, whack down govt and some other weasel pops up (big corp or whatever). This is the reason why I have no illusions that there are any "solutions;" I just know that BIG=FAIL and that ALL systems eventually fail: I have no need to lock into a big crusade against a single thing/entity.
yeah no shit. what do we need an electrical grid for in the first place? we already have a MASSIVE natural gas grid...none of it paid for by the Government i might add. were coal companies Government owned? nope. what we need is better use of our already very precious resources...and this article ain't gettin' us there. as usual.
And that gas and coal gets distributed how?
Gas via right-of-ways, managed by govt.
Coal via railroads or highways, brought to us by govt.
Look at Pipelineistan (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df03.html) and tell me that govt isn't involved in setting up infrastructure.
"what we need is better use of our already very precious resources." Yeah, strength through exhaustion. Think that perhaps basing the future on exhaustible resources might not be such a great idea? Shall we have another helping of Jevons Paradox?
A solar flare is just sci-fi mumbo jumbo bullshit. Esp when your best friend controls all the digital zeros. In fact, I could see these whores faking a flare. Would be cool if Ben was outside naked standing on a huge sheet of tin foil if one really did hit. lmfao.
Idiot.
http://www.spaceweather.com/
Is 100 million all it would cost to nuke Isreal ?
George W that Nazi piece of shit
Holocaust Survivors Criticize Israeli Policy Towards Palestinians
Hitler allies (Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) protest support for Jews.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/GazaHolo/index.html
Wow, WTFx10. That was a bit traumatizing, but amazingly created. It shocks me that a people who live by the motto, 'never again', could be running their own Warsaw ghettos and destroying generations of Palestinians. They treat the as if they were responsible for Auschwitz, Hitler, etc. Even the South African blacks, after generations of brutal oppression realized there was no use in mistreating those who had ben their oppressors. Hutu/Tutsi violence likewise ended with truth and reconciliation comittees.
We still seem to be looking all over the world for any remaining Nazis, yet the photos on that web page show the Nazis (in spirit) have all moved to Israel and taken up management positions in the 4th Reich.
Sick and sad.
Divide and conquer...
I think that we have to use more apt/universal means of defining these mindsets. I don't believe that one can tag an entire group of people as being the same as their masters/controllers.
It's all about POWER. As long as there are centers of power (BIG-ness) then these minds will seek to control them.
LOTS of Nazis ended up working for the US govt and US big business as well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkEUv6z20qo). Heck, one need only look at how NASA was formed to see all this in play: NASA, the seeing-eye, was always about the control of space, about the ultimate position of power (it even blends in with religious dogma, of the BIG POWER in the heavens looking over us and having control).
Glad to see other people are starting to realize what a Solar Flare could do to the global electric grid. I wrote a fiction book on the subject called "Day of the Dogs" on amazon kindle select.
It is here if anybody is interested.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007BRLFYU
The other thing people leave out of the Solar Flare equation is the poltical impact. The colapse of the US electrical grid system: the Texas Grid, the Eastern Grid and the BPA grid would eliminate the USA as a superpower. Once that happens a lot of other nations will begin to take action based on the reality the USA isn't around to keep things in check. In my e book for instance, I have both India/Pakistan and Israel/Islam nuking each other before the grid goes down.
It sucks to be the global supercop like the USA is, but we keep many nations from doing what they would like to do.
Global civilization will not survive the electric grid being down for 30 days. It may not make it if it only goes down two weeks. In 1999 I had a meeting with a high school friend who is now a engineer for Bechtel. He told me, to paraphrase Carville, "it's the electric grid stupid." No grid means no civilzation. Nuff said.
"Day of the Dogs?" By day 5 or 6, definately by the end of the second week, most of the dogs would be eaten.
I once tried to respond to an idiot who was "detailing" the effects of a Carrington event on US society. He did not understand that in mega-cities like LA and NYC, the first thing to go is water. After "Sandy" NYC demonstrated that they can go only 4 days before the roof-top tanks run dry. (Probably because the morons in the buildings were still pissing in their toilets and flushing.)
Once the processed/purified water is gone, you have about 3 or 4 days until you have massive deaths from dehydration and dysentery. There would be some survivors - people with brains who would remember that their hot water heaters would have clean water in them. And then it's all down-hill from there.
In a mega-city, there would be some who would know that boiling water removes the microbes and bacteria, and filtering would remove a lot of the impurities... but how many people have water micro-filters?
The guy responded that it wouldn't be a problem as we could "just go back to vacuum tubes for the electronics and the machines, and use steam if we couldn't get gasoline." He was apparently totally unaware of the fact that EVERY component in a typical radio or electronic gizmo has a whole design, manufacturing, and distribution infrastructure behind it. And to get a steam anything you start with a pressure vessel, put the holes in the right places for the gages and piping (with valves), and a firebox for the fire to heat the water. So then with a bit of fuel you'd have steam - but what would you DO with it?
Our civilization has dragged itself up from the mud to where we are one painful step at a time. There is no sliding back to the step below. There would be no "going back to vacuum tubes."
The original Carrington event lasted for 7 days. Iran. Israel, Pakistan, etc, the entire world would have more to worry about than pushing buttons to launch nukes... if they could even do that.
GW - you don't get it. You American chaps have money to burn - why paid on potential risks pocket the change and hope it doesn't happen. If it does, you can always fork out for it America cause its all "stimulus" anyways.
Take NYC - nice city, lots to see and plenty money to burn. Been a flood recently but hey another stimulus opportunity.
Us Brits can't afford such stimulus as we find it "expensive". Tight as we are, especially us tight gits in London we tend to build things like the Thames barrier to stop floods from happening.
We even put power cables underground on the basis of health and safety and less maintenance.
Katina, Sandy, regular power grid collapses - clearly its better to invest in the Raptor to bomb the hell out of the talliban firing AKs and grenades.
All hail the short term, save money by ignoring big risk and "investing" the pennies saved in the hand full of super-hero guys at the top who achieve everything inspite of every body else who do nothing particulary useful as measured by the pay freezes, pay cuts and redundancies.
Nice work, corporate mangement of America you are doing a sterling job
In a last minute compromise, Congress has declared the sun an enemy combatant. A squadron of drones is being dispatched to neutralize this threat to national security.
One can only hope for another "success" rate such as with the MIM-104 Patriot.
Nothing spells success like BIG govt + BIG corporation (esp military)!
Hope that flare goes right up Bens butt