Solar storm of 1859
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Solar storm of 1859
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Re: Solar storm of 1859
#2If you're interested in the modern risks of coronal mass injections, there's a report called "Solar Storm Risk to The North American Electrical Grid" [0] (2008) that summarizes the topic well. From page 4: "The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years."
[0] http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk...
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#3> Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.
What a fascinating read.
It really makes you happy that this type of solar/planetary stuff affecting the earth only happens on such a long timescale where it doesn't commonly affect our day-to-day lives as much as earthborn issues such as severe storms or other extreme meteorological events. But it's also a shame in some ways:
> Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7 o'clock p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#4If you're interested in the modern risks of coronal mass injections, there's a report called "Solar Storm Risk to The North American Electrical Grid" [0] (2008) that summarizes the topic well. From page 4: "The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years." [0] http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging…
We should hurry up with developing power over fiber, now that the new hollow core fibers have been developed that have essentially no transmission losses. Is one of the few power transmission technologies that should be entirely unaffected by solar storms.
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#5If you're interested in the modern risks of coronal mass injections, there's a report called "Solar Storm Risk to The North American Electrical Grid" [0] (2008) that summarizes the topic well. From page 4: "The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years." [0] http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging…
We should hurry up with developing power over fiber, now that the new hollow core fibers have been developed that have essentially no transmission losses. Is one of the few power transmission technologies that should be entirely unaffected by solar storms.
Pouring gigawatts of laser light through fiber sounds pretty hard, especially if you want to have electricity for the end consumer, not light.
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should hurry up with developing power over fiber, now that the new hollow core fibers have been developed that have essentially no transmission losses. Is one of the few power transmission technologies that should be entirely unaffected by solar storms.
Pouring gigawatts of laser light through fiber sounds pretty hard, especially if you want to have electricity for the end consumer, not light.
If sticking to a single frequency, the main loss is in producing the light in the first place as the new fibers can take a lot of power and conversion from light back to electricity can get above 90%, but laser efficiency is still pretty crap.
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#7> Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies. What a fascinating read. It really makes you happy that this type of solar/planetary stuff affecting the earth only happens on such a long timescale where it doesn't commonly affect our day-to-day lives as much as earthborn issues such as severe storms or other extreme meteorological events. But it…
It's stochastic. Could happen tomorrow.
We got lucky in 2012. [1]
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#8If you're interested in the modern risks of coronal mass injections, there's a report called "Solar Storm Risk to The North American Electrical Grid" [0] (2008) that summarizes the topic well. From page 4: "The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years." [0] http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging…
We should hurry up with developing power over fiber, now that the new hollow core fibers have been developed that have essentially no transmission losses. Is one of the few power transmission technologies that should be entirely unaffected by solar storms.
High power on a fiber has a problem called "fiber fuse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_fuse).
I followed the link on this article to the article on a more recent solar storm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012) where I found a report from Lloyd's which mentions that there are workarounds (like "neutral-current-blocking capacitors"), so it might be possible to make even large power transmission systems resistant against solar storms.
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should hurry up with developing power over fiber, now that the new hollow core fibers have been developed that have essentially no transmission losses. Is one of the few power transmission technologies that should be entirely unaffected by solar storms.
High power on a fiber has a problem called "fiber fuse" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_fuse ). I followed the link on this article to the article on a more recent solar storm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012 ) where I found a report from Lloyd's which mentions that there are workarounds (like "neutral-current-blocking capacitors"), so it might be possible to make even large power transmissio…
>High power on a fiber has a problem called "fiber fuse"
That is much less of an issue in the new hollow fibers, as their losses are significantly lower than glass ones.
Re: Solar storm of 1859
#10are there any data centers that are shielded from this sort of event?