A Terrifying Thought

After watching the events unfold in Fukushima and after researching how they happened I thought of an event that could easily cause the deaths of billions of people and may happen at any moment.

The Carrington event in 1859 was a solar storm that was the largest ever recorded. It wrecked havoc on our small scale electrical system at the time.

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.[5] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.[6] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[7]

Source: en.wikipedia.org...

If this were again to happen today, what would it do to our modern nuclear power plants? Instead of one nuke plant going off line we would see an entire continent going offline. Which no electronics to communicate or any working electrical equipment how could we cool these plants? With no working electric pumps where would the water come from? How would the plant's operators even call for help?

And the most terrifying question of all is; what would happen if the 104 operating reactors in the U.S all went into melt down at the same time due to a solar/geomagnetic storm that knocked out electrical infrastructure and electronic and satellite communications? Remember that back in 1959 this even caused fires in telegraph stations that were extremely low amp, now picture modern electrical infrastructure. Picture transformers exploding, picture nuke plants on fire. This could all be a reality if we are hit by another massive solar storm and CME.

We need to be asking these questions and people need to be scared %^&*less in order to get some serious revamping done. It could just be what saves our species.

It is a scary thought. I've been seeing recently the severity of the Fukushima radioactive side effects and how its spread almost globally.

And this is just ONE nuclear event. Imagine what happens if more than one has a melt down at the same time. It also makes you question: how much can really be done about it?

I looked into the powergrid problem a while ago; we can avoid destruction if we move our power grids underground or spend a few hundred million to protect them from solar storms. This is just the US, as many countries have already moved their power lines underground due to the instability of having an above ground power grid.

The entire US East of the Mississippi would become a "dead-zone." Correct me if I am wrong but there is something like 150 plants that would go offline and possibly meltdown. People would not be able to get out. They wouldn't even know it was happening without news broadcasts and such telling them about it.

reply to post by wWizard


There are 104 currently operation plants in the U.S according to Wikipedia, and i don't just think it's the east coast that would become uninhabitable. What about the reactors on the west coast? Everything that is in their wind path would be uninhabitable, including the massive agriculture in the prairies. The entire North American continents food production (the largest in the world) would become contaminated. That alone would cause 100's of millions of deaths.

Yikes! Never thought about that happening due to a solar flare. I mean even backup generators and what not would be down I would think. We'd have ourselves a genuine run away situation and that genie would not be able to be re-bottled.

Well, that makes reason #83,544 for not having nuclear power. Makes you wonder if the geniuses calling the shots ever contemplated such a scenario. And if they didn't, then they are most certainly not geniuses.

Good catch!

if even just a quarter of them went into meltdown the whole planet would be doomed. can you imagine the birth defects? the cancers?

Originally posted by epsilon69
reply to post by wWizard

 

There are 104 currently operation plants in the U.S according to Wikipedia, and i don't just think it's the east coast that would become uninhabitable. What about the reactors on the west coast? Everything that is in their wind path would be uninhabitable, including the massive agriculture in the prairies. The entire North American continents food production (the largest in the world) would become contaminated. That alone would cause 100's of millions of deaths.

Well when SHTF, California and the rest of the West coast is going to sink into the ocean, right?

Originally posted by pasiphae
if even just a quarter of them went into meltdown the whole planet would be doomed. can you imagine the birth defects? the cancers?

sure, if we live long enough to develop cancer and have babies. i have a feeling the amount of radiation would be enough to kill a person within weeks or even days. somehow i knew man's manipulation of the atom would be the end of us all. it's some scary stuff, but we must all let go of fear and just live life to the fullest while we can.

i was aware of the risk of CME's, and of course nuclear fallout, but had not combined the two into one possible scenario. good thinking!

Originally posted by sunshineteaco

Originally posted by pasiphae
if even just a quarter of them went into meltdown the whole planet would be doomed. can you imagine the birth defects? the cancers?

sure, if we live long enough to develop cancer and have babies. i have a feeling the amount of radiation would be enough to kill a person within weeks or even days. somehow i knew man's manipulation of the atom would be the end of us all. it's some scary stuff, but we must all let go of fear and just live life to the fullest while we can.

i was aware of the risk of CME's, and of course nuclear fallout, but had not combined the two into one possible scenario. good thinking!

I don't think we should let go of the fear. I think fear is necessary to save your life in some situations. Right now we are faced with a global problem that has the potential of destroying humanity and the only way to fix it is to get enough people scared of the ramifications of nuclear power as we can.

Doomsayers always talk about polar shifts, planetary impacts and earthquakes destroying us in 2012; what if the most likely even is one of the most obvious? Many physicist have been predicting and warning of massive solar storms coming in this next solar cycle, including Michio Kaku. Look what we have recently seen coming from the sun, scientists predict that the sun will have a quadrupole arrangement, scientists say this hasn't happened in 300 years. We have never actually been able to measure the effects of this arrangement and have only some educated guesses at what the sun is capable of in this state. Also the suns pole is flipping about 1 year earlier than expected.

Originally posted by epsilon69
I don't think we should let go of the fear. I think fear is necessary to save your life in some situations. Right now we are faced with a global problem that has the potential of destroying humanity and the only way to fix it is to get enough people scared of the ramifications of nuclear power as we can.

i disagree. i think awareness is necessary, but fear is a hindrance. fear makes people irrational, and can take over your thoughts in a way that greatly reduces quality of life. i believe a calm awareness, followed by controlled and well-thought-out action, is the best thing we could do to change our current trajectory.

the opposite of love is fear, not hate, as many believe. i'm confident that love is the only thing that can save mankind and mother earth.