[little jeremiah]

Please read my comment above and the article linked.

Are you a nuclear engineer with 30 years of experience in the field? The author of the article is.

[palmer]

Your author starts out by saying " I have recently been in contact with a member of the intelligence community who is highly knowledgeable in the area of EMP."

Either (1) he is making it up, (2) his source has revealed classified information (a crime) or (3) the information is publically available from reputable sources. It's your responsibility to show #3, not toss around speculation from a survivalist blog.

[antiRepublicrat]

The pulse needs to be extremely powerful to even think of frying an off-line diesel generator. Even then, a generator can be quickly repaired.

Most of our testing so far to produce the best EMP is megaton-level nukes in space. Such a thing could take out most (not all) modern active, unshielded, non-hardened electronics in the US. For non-nuclear pulses, you’d have to get right up close to the power plant with a father big bomb because such pulses degrade rather quickly under the inverse-square law.