Originally posted by PlanetXisHERE
Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by PlanetXisHERE
Thanks for the investigation. Will you let us know on here if you see something related to the Sun's particle emissions and/or cosmic rays
that we should be concerned about?
Sure. In the meantime, please write to your government representatives and urge them to take appropriate measures to harden the electrical
infrastructure against large CMEs. They are a very real danger, and public utilities are loathe to spend money on replacement transformers just in
case they are damaged by a once in a century event.
That is cause for concern, but I'm more worried about the electrical infrastructure in nuke plants. I can survive grid collapse, worldwide fallout
from over 400 nuclear reactors or even a few dozen I'm not so sure about.
The good news about CME's and solar flares is, like hurricanes here on Earth, we get a lot more heads up than say with a tornado or especially like
an earthquake (or worse, earthquake and tsunami).
Power companies today take solar weather very seriously now (as compared to in the past), and know that much of their equipment can survive a large
scale CME that is a direct hit with us simply by shutting the equipment down so that the grid is off line. The current induced in transformers and
substations by the CME alone is a lot less than if the grid is up, and especially if power demand at the time is high. In those cases, the CME can
induce more than the equipment can handle simply because it was almost at capacity during normal operations.
Prior to these times, we didn't really come to understand that large sun activity could shut down or damage our grid. With the understanding now, and
especially since a lot of that equipment (those massive sub station transformers) can not be replaced quickly or would have to be manufactured again
taking possibly years, they take it a lot more seriously.
As for the nuclear power plants: the good news there is if electrical power fails, the rods can be manually (and quite quickly) be inserted to stop
the reaction.
However, as you pointed out, there is the cooling to consider especially for the spent rods. Back up pumps are required, and again, since they are not
normally running, they should be safe from a large CME hitting the Earth and should fire up just fine.
BUT: they run on like diesel fuel and would have to be kept running, but for how long? However, unlike what happened over in Japan, a CME would give
us plenty of heads up and time to prepare for.
I've not go into researching this myself, but you might want to (maybe even do a thread on it). I do know that power companies are well known for
going "cheap" and cutting corners.
Now THIS is a "Doomsday" idea I can support you on partially!
