Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solar storm of 1859

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#11

Post by Scaevolus »

starbeast wrote: post #4
nhkssol wrote: post #2

If 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.

https://www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html

> A general problem of hollow-core fibers is that their propagation losses are substantially higher than for solid-core fibers – in particular when single-mode guidance is required.

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#12

Post by mabbo »

If it happened again today, the event itself wouldn't be the thing you'd tell your grandchildren about. It would be the terrifying years afterwards as the world tried to put itself back together.

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#13

Post by altitudinous »

Hmm, we always have a science fiction meme that says that says any civilisation that gets to our level of technology will wipe itself out with nuclear weapons or something. This seems like a more real risk, the technology gets sufficiently advanced that it cannot withstand any external shock. 1859 = fine, 2018 it would destroy capitalism and commerce. The same dark abyss we were staring down at the time of the GFC.

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#15

Post by Animats »

Oh, the Carrington Event again. This has been on HN several times. It ought to be on a list of common misconceptions.

- This has nothing to do with "EMP". That's a big but brief RF pulse with a rise time around 1ns. This is induced DC in long wires over a period of hours.

- The basic effect is that a current is induced in the earth's crust, resulting in a DC voltage between grounds at widely separated points. This is mostly a problem for long AC high-tension power lines using wye-connected transformers at each end which run in the same direction as mountains of igneous rock. The DC component can partially saturate the transformer, using up some of its capacity. If undetected, transformers can overheat, and worst case, burn out. This occurred on March 13, 1989 on some lines in the eastern US.

- PJM, which runs the northeastern US power grid, is now prepared for this. See PJM's training manual for this[1], starting at page 22. They get 1 to 6 days warning from the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. They have monitoring for unwanted DC flows at multiple points in the power grid. When trouble appears, certain power lines have to have their current reduced.

- A few times a year, more at the top of the sunspot cycle, there are warnings of a potential problem. PJM last issued a warning on August 26, 2018. It didn't progress to an "alert", or actual action. There are people in a control room in Valley Forge, PA, and another backup location, watching this. They can reroute power around the trouble spots, call for extra generation output, and dump some loads if necessary. Load dumping starts with bulk buyers of "interruptible power" - aluminum smelters, Bitcoin mines, etc., which are willing to be the first turned off in exchange for a discount.

- It's not a problem for anything shorter than hundreds of miles. It's not a problem for high-voltage DC power lines, like the Pacific Intertie and the really long ones from western to eastern China. It has zero effect on fiber optics or small devices.

- When you encounter clueless reporters writing about the power grid, aim them at "PJM 101", which is a set of introductory training materials on how the power grid works, written for people who run it.

[1] https://pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/gen-exa...

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#16

Post by api »

starbeast wrote: post #6
adrianN wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If laser efficiency were good enough for this we would have laser fusion.

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#17

Post by starbeast »

api wrote: post #16
starbeast wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If laser efficiency were good enough for this we would have laser fusion.

I didn't realise that the laser's inherent inefficiency was the main loss in laser fusion, though it would make sense.

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#18

Post by starbeast »

Scaevolus wrote: post #11
starbeast wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

https://www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html > A general problem of hollow-core fibers is that their propagation losses are substantially higher than for solid-core fibers – in particular when single-mode guidance is required.

That's interesting, I remember reading last year about advances in hollow fibers that said they were better than glass for a single frequency.

I followed the reference and it leads to a paper from 2013;

>Hollow-core fibers (HCFs) are a revolution in light guidance with enormous potential. They promise lower loss than any other waveguide, but have not yet achieved this potential because of a tradeoff between loss and single-moded operation.

https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-5-62...

I haven't yet found the reference to the fiber I was reading about, though I do know it was still in the lab.

edit - it might be this stuff - http://optics.org/news/6/6/20

edit2 - https://www.novuslight.com/hollow-core-fiber-breakthrough_N8...

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#19

Post by greesil »

jefftk wrote: post #14

David Roodman wrote an excellent 4-part analysis of risks from geomagnetic storms for the givewell blog: https://blog.givewell.org/tag/geomagnetic-storms/

This is an amazing read. "When magnetic cores saturate and the field strays outside the core (see my first post), wires and insulation can overheat and in effect burn. Hot spots manifest not as a flames (one hopes) but as chemical decomposition that forces gaseous byproducts into the oil, which can be monitored. In all of these eight transformers, degradation began right after storm activity and proceeded slowly, so that failure arrived in weeks or months rather than minutes."

Re: Solar storm of 1859

#20

Post by lolc »

altitudinous wrote: post #13

Hmm, we always have a science fiction meme that says that says any civilisation that gets to our level of technology will wipe itself out with nuclear weapons or something. This seems like a more real risk, the technology gets sufficiently advanced that it cannot withstand any external shock. 1859 = fine, 2018 it would destroy capitalism and commerce. The same dark abyss we were staring down at the time of the GFC.

> more real risk

What's not real about the threat of nuclear bombs?

Post reply on HN