[HCARC] Just Missed Earth

[SARA SANDSTROM]

Lets take a look at this in a reasonable light.  

The two real threats of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) are high energy charged particles and a geomagnetic storm.  The high energy charged particles are primarily a threat to inadequately hardened space systems and to astronauts in orbit or on the moon who are also inadequately radiation hardened.  The geomagnetic storm will induce large currents on any long wires, hundreds of miles long.  

Early telegraph was entirely on wires many east west oriented and very long.  Modern comm doesn't have the same problem.  Much current comm traffic goes over fiber optic lines.  I can't imagine a mechanism to induce large currents on fiber optic cables.  The main threat to modern comm systems is through their power line connections.  Our dependence on long copper wires for comm now is zero or very close to it.  The telegraph story doesn't count.  Even comm satellites aren't critical to modern comm. 

The power companies have lived through a few fairly big geomagnetic storms in the last few decades.  We can hope they have learned how to protect their equipment with circuit breakers, etc.  By the way, its primarily a power transmission problem and not a generation problem.  

Now, lets get to the real problems.  Hardening the electronics on satellites is expensive and has large weight penalties.  In our society where profit dominates, most commercial organizations haven't devoted the time and money to things that don't have an immediate payoff.  Radiation hardening is a leader in that category.  The power companies really aren't any better.  When there is a large dramatic powe r outage the power companies will make sure the same problem can't happen again, except, over time as they re pla ce  their equipment the protective devices aren't updated and replaced. 

S o what w ould a big bad CME really mean to us?  Because of the incompetent short-sighted management of many commercial companies, we will have some power outages.  It could take years to replace large transformers just because it takes that long to manufacture them.  If they were properly protected, we don't have to lose them.  We'll lose Direct TV, DIS H Network, satellite internet, nationwide paging,  nationwide radio feeds, etc.  I'm not sure that's a real loss. 

Note that this is not a science or engineering problem.  It is an unwillingness of short-sighted and selfish management/leadership to invest in 'hardening' to protect their customers because it hurts their bottom line.  Rem ember this the next time these people try to tell you how much they are doing for you.   

Kerry  




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