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The Government Spends Trillions On Unlikely Threats … But Won’t Spend a Billion Dollars to Prevent the Very Real Possibility of
Studies show that people are worry about the wrong things.
We are terrified of things that will probably never happen, and underestimate the real dangers which face us.
As we noted last year, 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 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 does a good job of reporting on this issue today:
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.
And see this.
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TPTB can't find new ways to further control you if you are already safe from yet another threat.
Is this an April Fools oped? Add a few resistors to protect a nuclear power plant? ZHers aren't going to fall for this. Power transmission systems are protected against megavolt superstrikes by lightning, power to ground shorts, phase-to-phase shorts, and exploding transformers. Hydrogen quenched circuit breakers, oil immersion switches, over-voltage protection, and spike diverters are everywhere. No. Solar flares aren't going to send us into the dark ages. On the other hand, a mouse nibbling on just the right wire in the control room will probably cause a major black swan event.
It happened in 1989 in Quebec. Solar flare, not mouse.
Research first, post second.
I wasn't aware that the event in Quebec caused anything more than a temporary blackout. Nuclear holocaust? No.
goverment has tonns of money to waste - financing pro american pedofiles, por ejemplo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a_0620_XxU
I'll have you know we finance anti-american pedophiles every chance we get.
Bring it on. I would love to see it. Two to three weeks without elecricity? No screens for the kids? Books and storytelling taking the place of ipads and laptops and DVD's? Such a place would be heaven.
2-3 weeks? Did you read how long it will take to get new HV transformers in place? Your kids will be working so hard on the back 40, if you HAVE a back 40 that they won't have time to read books. Ask an 8th century Welsh serf if such a place was heaven...bring that on yourself, not me. I'll vote to pay the extra $150 mil.
Bring it on. I would love to see it. Two to three weeks without elecricity? No screens for the kids? Books and storytelling taking the place of ipads and laptops and DVD's?
.. having snowball fights with radioactive ash, sunning themselves in the cyan glow of nuclear craters, and toasting marshmellows over the smoldering corpses of neighors caught in the initial gamma ray flash ..
.. fun for the whole family, at least until your organs liquify and your teeth fall from bleeding gums .. still, looking on the brightside is an art, and what could be brighter than the heart of the sun burning brightly and cheerily just a few blocks from your home.
Don't forget the joyous feeling of your brain swelling up like an overboiled egg. It's the proverbial icing on the cake! B')
Is this before or after we go swimming in the spent fuel pools? Once the pumps stop and the fuel starts bubbling, it's a hot tub!
ot
March 25, 2012
Obama: Window for diplomatic solution to nuclear Iran is closinghttp://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/obama-window-for-diplomatic-solu... d
March 9, 2003
Powell: Window Is Closing for Peaceful Solution in Iraqhttp://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2003/iraq-030309-afp...
Mar 17, 2003
Bush: Diplomatic Window will Close Today
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ncRFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=470MAAAAIBAJ&pg=5...
And we Almost went a weekend without having to worry about Iran.
And here I was thinking the Black Swan would come from Africa in the form of some ebola like virus...now it may come from the sun?
As our society and technology depenence becomes evermore complex, the odss of some seemingly innocuous event bringing us to our knees increases.
If all of our texting zombies suddenly lose the use of their devices due to a solar storm, will they go on a rampage as their attention is suddenly diverted to reality?
rosiescenario
http://www.dailytech.com/Baffling+Illness+Strikes+Africa+Turns+Children+...
Baffling Illness Strikes Africa, Turns Children Into Mindless "Zombies"
It's called the "nodding disease" and it's a baffling illness that has struck thousands of children in northern Uganda.
Grace Lagat, a northern Uganda native, is mother of two children -- Pauline Oto and Thomas -- both of whom are victims of the disease. For their safety, when she leaves the house, she now ties them up, using fabric like handcuffs. She recalls, "When I am going to the garden, I tie them with cloth. If I don't tie them I come back and find that they have disappeared."
Reportedly the children gnaw at their fabric restraints, like a rabid animals -- or "zombies" of popular fiction -- in an attempt to escape. (This is based on CNN's commentary.)
(Jason Oh points out that the restraints are intended to protect the chidlren from harm, and from starting fires.)
The effort to restrain the children is not unwarranted. In one of the most bizarre symptoms of this tragic illness, children with the disease are reportedly setting fire to buildings in their communities. Coupled with the aimless wandering this disease provokes in victims, this is a deadly combination. More than 200 people have been killed in fires believed to be set by the zombified children.
Yeah listen to this as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX6YnEILqec (skip to 40:14)
Radiation fucks with the immune system though, DESTROYS it, so that could be the aftermath for any survivors.
In my mind the runaway nuclear industry is the main problem; the response to Fukushima (NO response) is evidence they've gone insane.
When a bank collapses (after extend and pretend) it doesn't turn into a lethal, radiation spewing crater. But, everything's related.
all those "humanitarian" Bill Gates vaccinatons!
Sources in Uganada, speaking on condition of anonymity, said many of the children recently received vaccinations provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Hell, we call it television in the developed world.
GW, no interest because the current head of DHS has not figured out a way to personally enrich himself with this sort of project. Show the carrot, and they will show the money, like they did with the cancer-causing back scatter x-ray machines that made Chertoff a millionaire.
But the latest update to the National Emergency executive order might have been made in anticipation of this sort of thing. That sort of outcome plays better to the hands of TPTB than preventing the problems from the get-go.
The elite could also stage a false-flag North Korean/Iranian nuke EMP blast over the US and let the sheeple kill each other.
What will happen to my Chevy Volt (aka Obama Yugo)?
When do they come out with the iGeiger-Counter?
There's an app for that!
Looks like you've finally jumped the shark with this one George.
....let's see. Whose the most likely 'terrorist' threat to the USA? Well, going on track record, we have Isreali-owned moving companies and their art vending associates and their subsidiaries firmly embedded in the various three letter acronymed enforcement elements of the puppet state currently managing the complete disenfranchisment of the people whom you piously pretend to be afraid for.
So, using your compelling logic, it would make sense to displace more stolen tax dollars into governmental funding of preventative measures that eliminate or mitigate the possibility of other elements of the same sionist octopus attacking the infrastructure of the poor saps who paid for the same kind of attack on their symbolic structures of power and governance like WTC, the Pentagon, and Oklahoma Murrah etc. like before?!?!?!?
A far greater clear and present danger to our world than even the the possibility of solar storms is the insidious campaign of certain messianic cultists to eliminate all opposition to their attempt to enslave us all to their hegemonist fantasies of globalist control.
We need writers about to step up to the plate and tell the truth about stuntex, Iran, Fukushima and the rest of the ugly story, not more disingenuous spin that gets folks ready for a false flag attack>
http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/fukushima1.html
How about really eliminating the incentive to attack America, by eliminating ZOG and their puppets from American soil, and therefore KRUSHing all of it's external & internal enemies in one swift kick?
I used to think you were the cats' meow, George, and the go to guy for stuff like FUKUSHIMA....now I see you are just part of a tired cast of dissemblers hoping to herd the sheeple back into the pen afore truthzones like ZH get too much traction.
That Sun sounds like a dam terrorist that hates our freedom. Send in the aircraft carriers ...
What a joyful troll you are. If you can't tell the difference between what George is talking about here, and the EE, you're pretty stupid.
he he...joyful troll is it!??!....well, yu least ways half right~!
tell yu what, genius...I'm gonna stay stoopid, an yu stay on the garden path there with Mr Pied Piper...
let's compare notes a little ways on shall we!>?!?
EE???? yu musta strayed outta yur usual pasture....did "Turd" forget to attach the battery to the fence agin????
And further to which: after a good night's sleep and a cup of java, I can more clearly see how possibly good intentioned people subject to the usual degree of normalcy bias can be inveigled by GW's clever rhetoric into fiercely defending his attempt to shield a direct insertion of Korporate Kleptocratic Kabbalist messaging with a feel good cover story of solar storm damage prevention.
Whilst calling your interlocutor stupid is perhaps not the best way to get a the most out of a discussion, I realize that not everybody proceeds at the same pace, so overlooking that faux pas is not hard...in this case, the fact that you are a denizen of a website where the hard core truth about where both financial market manipulations and their geo-political equivalent come from is purposely glossed over by a meaningless StarWarsy term like Evil Empire shows me that you are unlikely to be capable of discerning the nuances of George's doublespeak...so here ya go:
Take a good and necessary subject like the potential for major economic fallout from an ACT OF GOD like solar storms, bring it through the necessary stages of argument to make it appear like your take on the subject is another example of your built up street cred as a known fighter against THE SYSTEM...then, at the end, slip in the reference to the EMP terrorist attack on Amerika...a meme created by and exclusively utilized by those who stealthily seek to build up a problem-reaction-solution response that lets them mandate a sense of helpless terror in the population they seek to control....(of course you're first clue should have been mention of a congressionally-mandated panel....when's the last time Congress mandated anything not designed to coverup their corrupt tracks?!??!? Who but a closet system appartachik pays any attention to what Congress does anymore?)
Bingo! You've just created that little bit of acquiescence in the minds of those who think they've built up some kind of immunity to bullshit scripts - 'OH! There's a chance that some shadowly faceless group of [people who hate our freedoms] want to throw us back into the stone age through terror attacks on our homeland! And of course I will trust my handler George when he tells me how we are going to deal with threat'...(in the next installment of the meme script)! Congratulations champ....you've been played!
It's incremental, it's done all the time now, on so called alternative sites which have been either set up or taken over by operatives of the Secret Government to spin disinfo for the useful idiots to weave into narratives of pseudo-rebellion that keeps real opposition from every building into something threatening to the puppetmasters. I certainly don't object to GW being allowed to do this sly manipulating here - it's a useful virus to the ZH immune system to have the odd flu symptom, so that killer T cells can do their thing!
So don't thank me, thank yuself, though this thread is now stale, you too have contributed in your own way to furthering the process of discovery...just as genius prognosticators like Ned Schmidt, Jon Nadler, or the owners of certain PM sites whose denizens practice group think adulation of their leaders' serial wrong calls also play their role in the bigger picture! Stupid is as stupid does, my friend...now get all your fellow EE buddies here together and hit that junk button till the pain goes away!
+1
Add that to my first thought on reading the intro: "WTF, George!!!"
It's not just the scientific community that is warning of serious solar activity during this coming cycle. http://www.terrybennett.net/headlines.html (this guy has been pretty accurate on a number of occasions)
Many of the discussions on ZH deal, at their core, with the tremendous injustice in our global economic systems, especially in the west. I am likely not alone (although clearly many ZH readers see differently) in believing in a redemptive creator who cares about justice and will eventually put things aright. We'll see how many hard lessons we have to learn along the way, reaping our own folly, beforehand!
Japan, most of Europe, South Korea and the US would turn into nuclear wastelands. Large parts of Canada, Russia and India would be inhabitable.
Here's a map of all nuclear reactors :
http://maptd.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/global-earthquake-activity-v...
New Zealand will be the new center of civilization.
That's why I moved here.
The world already is a nuclear wasteland. Enough plutonium has been aerosolized from Fukushima to kill every human being on the planet 1,000x over, and it's still emitting. There's no plan to stop anything, it's too hot in the reactor buildings to even take accurate readings. There is every sign all work, other than monitoring, has been abandoned.
Everything they could pluck with cranes and dump in the ocean is done. That's another story, but be careful with those fish tacos.
Japan has about 5 years left, western North America maybe 10 years on the outside. The discovery that our food and water is completely contaminated will occur very shortly. The infant mortality rates are skyrocketing, and child thyroid cancer is next. It'll get to us adults shortly, our lungs are full of radionuclide hot particles.
No big deal. Now it's a personal decision of how we will individually deal with our extinction as a species. I suggest spending as much time as you can with your loved ones.
Bingo!
Sources? Links? I've wondered about the ramifications of Fukishima. Who is saying what you are saying?How can it really be that bad? You's think casulaties from Japan would be reported more.
Hope you're still looking.
enenews.com
ex-skf.blogspot.com/
fukushima-diary.com/
enformable.com/
The Government Spends Trillions On Becoming A Likely Threat...
I'm not terrified about anything. I hate all things fucking equally.
q99x2
"I'm not terrified about anything. I hate all things fucking equally."
My soulmate?
If you are a chick will you marry me?
If you are just another Gay dude trolling for brokenhearts, I suppose if you have Asian "Ladyboy" looks it may be workable.
I've been reading about this for years now. Kind of odd with how the problems just compound. A true black swan event?
If this were to happen, it wouldn't be a black swan, it would be a fiery immortal swan from hell.
If you want some (interesting) insight... read One Second After.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
Interesting read lolmao500.
If America gets uppity, the NWO will try to fuck us with EMP. America has foiled the NWO's plots for world domination multiple times, and it also has a high percentage of Christians who will be pissed when the Satanism of the puppetmasters becomes widely known. Americans make good, dumb slaves for now, but in the long term they cannot be trusted- and besides, the NWO still wants revenge. They are setting the stage for America to be clusterfucked, long-term, from all directions at once. Hence Congress ignoring the cheap protection measures of the EMP commission, plus fracking (destroys water self-sufficiency; they probably even put dioxin in their secret sauce), plus helping us make enemies all around the world, plus our whole society being organized around cheap oil, plus destroying the chains of title for houses, plus everyone dumbed down, plus illegal immigrants, etc, etc. And the NWO makes sweet profits from all of this as it rides America down like Tex on the bomb. Despite the looming clusterfuck, I think it is better to take chances with chaos than to continue as a NWO puppet state.
I'm reading that right now. Very interesting book. The writing isn't that impressive but the subject matter is riveting.
I read it and can't really fault it; the author appears to have spent a lot of time thinking the consequences through to the end.
the last blackout happened in New York City i wanna say back in 2005 or 06. No chaos like the one in...was it 77? Anywho Edison electric was then one of the worst electrical utilities on the planet. Cramer talks them up so they must be doing something better. They bought the natural gas utility up here which i thought was a disaster because this was a great company being forced to merge with a piece of crap. Behind the grid however comes the natural gas infrastructure which is also being built out to an extraordinary degree. There was a huge explosion in San Francisco caused by this system...but i don't think anyone would argue "we're talking solar storms" as the cause. To me the biggest issue we face is the the total lack of interest in the flow of money and funds in and out of money center financial institutions to the tune of billions of dollars to be used for who know's what. "accident waiting to happen."
Trillions on unlikely threats
but blow away a bunch of kids in Afghan and it is a bargain @$50k a pop but if you were just injured the payment is $11k
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230340470457730315057508182...
just a suggestion, perhaps it would make sense to enroll all Afghan nationals in one of those accident insurance programs like 4H offers its members
http://www.uvm.edu/extension/youth/pdfs/leadertraininga10.pdf
"It was worth it" - Maddy Albright