I’m a EE. I do power engineering.
The problem with EMP is that it hits generators and transformers the hardest, and it hits them so fast that you can’t isolate them.
EMP, put as simply as I can, is when gamma radiation knocks electrons out of the upper atmostphere. It’s like taking a hammer to a brace in a coal mine - the coal dust just creates clouds of dust.
This gamma ‘hammer’ shakes so many electrons loose, and lenses it toward earth, and it all gets picked up by long conductors.
The current it generates melts the windings of transformers and generators. Solid state electronics doesn’t stand a chance. Faraday cages are the only thing that protects against EMP. Some underground parking garages will work, given that the rebar acts almost exactly like a faraday cage.
Anyway, the transformers used in the Atlantic and Pacific grids aren’t made in the US. They are made in Korea. Some in Japan.
We don’t keep spares for that sort of part. They are massive. They are hauled by trains, for the most part. Those trains are diesel electric. They won’t work either, even if you had the spares to do the job.
Unless it was made using the old tube technology, the electronics won’t work.
EMP actually has three parts to it. M1, M2, and M3. M3 is the ‘long tail’ that happens after a nuke blast is what really degrades transmission infrastructure.
Semiconductor rectifiers? They are definitely toast. They make the DC electricity go wavy (AC) so you can transmit it without much loss.
If it is made with semiconductors, its toast (M1 will do it in).
Believe it. EMP would probably kill up to 80 percent of the US population in 12 months. What would end up happening is the reversion of the ecology to its environmental limit (the max number of plant and animal species that can be supported on a given piece of land).
In cities, we artificially suspend the law of environmental limit by using JIT delivery of food that allows us to live on top of one another, like bees live in a hive.
(See Operation Fishbowl)
The Soviets found out about this before we did. Fishbowl was when we tested it and really documented it.
M4L
You’ve got about a 60% understanding.
The real truth is that we don’t know what will make it through an EMP, and what will not.
We do know power generation/transmission infrastructure will be impacted significantly. The big core transformers (the ones that need trains and cranes to move them) are likely to mostly survive for a variety of highly technical reasons.
You’re wrong about rebar and underground garages, again for a variety of highly technical reasons.
Plenty of solid state tech will survive - but “it depends”
EMP is comprised of E1, E2, and E3.
You’re right, chaos would rule, as in any disaster situation.