Posted on 12/27/2018 5:42:58 PM PST by upchuck
Dr. Peter Pry is the Executive Director of the EMP Task Force.
Pry explains there are three sources of EMP: the sun, nuclear weapons, and non-nuclear weapons.
The entire world would be affected, putting “electric grids and critical infrastructures” as well as “billions of lives” at risk. Pry believes it is “inevitable” that we will be struck by a Carrington-class geomagnetic storms, for “it’s not a question of if, but it’s a question of when will that happen.”
A second EMP threat stems from nuclear weapons “detonated at high altitude” of 30 to 400 kilometers. “A single nuclear weapon detonated at that altitude would create an electromagnetic field that would cover all of North America, most of Canada and a good part of Mexico.”
Non-nuclear EMP weapons, or radio frequency, weapons are a third cause for concern. “A non-nuclear EMP weapon has very limited range, typically a hundred yards or so, but the electric grid is so fragile that if you had a terrorist or criminal organization” with multiple radio frequency weapons, they “could cause a nationwide blackout” by attacking high-voltage (HV) transformers.
As the chief of staff of the congressional EMP commission for 17 years, he notes a number of concerns. Aircraft would fall from the sky and automobiles would fail to start. Water would no longer be available in homes. “We only have enough food to feed 326 million people for 30 days and the food would begin to spoil within 72 hours.”
Should a nationwide blackout occur for as long as a year, the EMP commission reports “90% of our population could starve to death, die from disease and societal chaos, and collapse.”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Oh dear God. Yes, it certainly could, but the EMP would be so weak as to have little to no effect on our power grid at all. Lower-altitude detonations would be more powerful, but constrained to a single state or so, and even then you'd better be more concerned about the physical damage due to the NUDET.
There is always so much hyperventilation on this topic, but not too much in the way of facts. Go talk to the experts at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. It's a healthy dose of reality.
Solar Panels and EMP, well the EMP is hazardous because of long electric power and communication lines. Unless you are very near an EMP they are not likely to hurt local appliances including solar panels except that anything connected to the grid is susceptible to damage from the potential tremendous over voltage from the EMP induced into long wires. My particular solar system is a battery backup system which means I really run off the battery. Yes I get power from the grid but everything on the solar side goes through the battery which is a great isolation device. I also have several over voltage protectors.
Your question does not have a terribly straight forward answer. but I hope the above makes a little sense to you.
I learned a lesson about this the hard way. While installing my solar I accidentally put 240 Volts on half my 120V circuits. Burned out a lot of stuff in the house. Had to get a new microwave, dishwasher and several little plug in transformers that charge battery operated devices. A good lesson though. That is what will happen in an area affected by EMP except the voltage will likely be higher. It is similar to what happens when lightening strikes very close to your house power line. You will get a bad over voltage spike and take out home appliances.
Stories about car computers being wasted are stories. While not Faraday cages cars have a lot of metal surrounding vulnerable components and their associated wiring. Those components also have their own metal housings most of the time. If you have a generator and plenty of fuel you should be able to run your refrigerator for a few hours every day and keep your food from spoiling. Unfortunately it may be many weeks before you will be able to renew your fuel supply, store a lot to have it on hand.
I have no idea what your point is. I said “I can’t understand why nothing has been done to harden the grid.”
What’s the problem with that statement?
You do make the best case for minimal to no EMP damage.
The ACTUAL above ground nuclear tests, up to 10 megatons, did not cause widespread damage. Though it was an era of limited solid state circuitry.
That’s a valid point nonetheless!
Everything can look like a point source from a sufficient distance.
Of course, it is much more complicated than that. There are several effects. The effects create different damages at different intensities at different distances.
Lots of unknowns. But, the ability of the point source to create substantial problems at longer distances is well understood. It is the gamma rays from the point source interacting with the atmosphere at 20-40 km above the surface that creates the "pulse" or "pulses".
The gamma rays have a saturation effect on the atmosphere. Once 50,000 volts per meter is reached, you do not get much more. If the gamma ray intensity is enough to reach that level, it is enough. Additional gamma rays don't increase the voltage.
For the same reason, multiple nuclear weapons are limited in how much EMP they will produce, as the first weapon's gamma rays saturate a large area of the atmosphere, and ionize the "source region" of the atmosphere (20-40)km up.
Disclaimer: this is only from my reading about EMP effects, it is not based on first hand knowledge of EMP testing or computer simulations of them.
Understood. thanks.
Don't fall for this. If they aren't in on it, then American Thinker got hoodwinked.
I presume that your power went out for awhile. Sarcasm aside, you're egregiously-wrong and echoing spasms of propaganda. There is limited knowledge on the study of the propagation of EMP - mostly from the unintended effects of the Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962, but it's good physics nonetheless and, certainly, a topic for national security...just as the EMP Task Force on Homeland Security was intended to address (albeit poorly; thanks Congress).
Here's some history on the Congressional EMP Caucus and Trennt Franks' SHIELD Act (aka Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage, H.R. 668) with everything you need to come up to speed on your own.
Here's the authorization absent any funding for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
As an aside, Brannon Howse hosts a very interesting discussion on the topic here.
As a pathetic footnote to the discussion, it should be noted that the SHIELD Act never went anywhere and Pry still has to rely upon donations.
I suggest ponying up.
All nuclear tests are not the same. EMP depends on gamma ray production and interaction with the atmosphere 20-40 km about the surface.
Gamma ray production depends on the type of devise.
To maximize EMP effects, the devise has to be detonated at high altitudes, so the gamma rays effect the source region. Inside the lower, denser, atmosphere, the gamma rays don't reach nearly as large of an area of the "source" region, just from geometry and absorption of energy by the lower atmosphere.
I do not believe in the hyperbole of "One Second After". I don't think all cars would stop running. I doubt all small devices would be fried. But, the effect is real, and there is potential for serious widespread damage.
One of the big problems is, we simply do not know, because actual testing is very hard to do on any scale above the laboratory level.
Should be 20-40 km above the surface
Just remembered one other detail. I had to start the computer normally by pushing the start button. The computer came on normally, not with the notice that it had been shut down unexpectedly as if the power were shut off. It didn’t turn off through the power supply.
1989 as bad as it was was not comparable to a carrington event.
A carrington class GIC running through a substation could prevent safety systems from operating and destroy some transformers in minutes.
Its unresolved within ISOs what to do. One answer is to island the grid or shut it down completely. These are bad answers, to be sure, but preferable to destroying hardware. Industry is still grappling with how to implement things like this if directed to do it. Very complex
HEMP is generated below the ionosphere but ionospheric propagation can be expected to be problematic for some time after an EMP.
These models match actual HEMP data from atmospheric tests. These models are all you’ve got. Even chamber/range tests are not perfect.
It’s all we have, but they are pretty good and match actual data fairly closely.
“YOU have no hard data”
Depends what you consider “hard” data.
We are pretty communications will be interrupted. We know protective relaying is impacted.
These are things that are critical to operating the grid safely.
You could hardly be more wrong. The Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962 blew a couple of streetlight fuses in Honolulu. The "Carrington Event" knocked out a few telegraph receivers. Keep in mind that telegraph lines of the era consisted of dozens of miles of wire powered by a small battery. The receivers were unfused highly sensitive devices capable of reacting to the tiny electrical currents produced so far away. They were far more susceptible to damage from stray fields than the modern electrical and communication systems we have today.
I've never heard of anyone dying of starvation from a couple of blown streetlight fuses, much a whole civilization. Do you really think everyone has been just wringing their and worrying about EMP damage for the last century and a half without doing a thing about it? If you do, you need to read the Grimm Brothers "Clever Elise" fairy tale.
So the computer froze? That definitely sounds like a random error symptom like when a DRAM chip starts going bad. It would be amazing coincidence if it just happened at same moment the bulb burned out. It all makes sense.
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900 miles away with the detonation a mere 10 degrees above the horizon from a perspective in Honolulu. Few declassified details exist, but the fact is that the SP test blew a hole in the inverse-square law for reasons I'm not going to debate here. Oh yeah: Car ignitions were "fused" on the big island.
"The bomb released 10-25 MeV of prompt gamma rays (0.13% of the bomb yield). The 550 km East-West telephone line was 7.5 m above the ground, with amplifiers every 60 km. All of its fuses were blown by the induced peak current, which reached 2-3 kA at 30 microseconds, as indicated by the triggering of gas discharge tubes. Amplifiers were damaged, and lightning spark gaps showed that the potential difference reached 350 kV. The 1,000 km long Aqmola-Almaty power line was a lead-shielded cable protected against mechanical damage by spiral-wound steel tape, and buried at a depth of 90 cm in ground of conductivity 10 -3 S/m. It survived for 10 seconds, because the ground attenuated the high frequency field, However, it succumbed completely to the low frequency EMP at 10-90 seconds after the test, since the low frequencies penetrated through 90 cm of earth, inducing an almost direct current in the cable, that overheated and set the power supply on fire at Karaganda, destroying it. Cable circuit breakers were only activated when the current finally exceeded the design limit by 30%. This limit was designed for a brief lightning-induced pulse, not for DC lasting 10-90 seconds. By the time they finally tripped, at a 30% excess, a vast amount of DC energy had been transmitted. This overheated the transformers, which are vulnerable to short-circuit by DC."
That was nearly at the terminal limit, just within the tangent point.
Fairy tale. Heh. Alrighty, then.
I did some work at Kirtland AFB on EMP in the 90’s. There were still simulators working there at the time, Trestle, HPD1 and HPD2, and ARES. Some of those are decomissioned now.
I was hoping the system was more robust than to allow Jeremy Rifkin and one federal court to shut down an important defense research tool.
Just googled Jeremy Rifkin. He now advises both the European Union and the People's Republic of China.
And we wonder about the insanity of decisions on the global stage.
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