[HN Gopher] The Carrington Event: not something to worry about (...
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The Carrington Event: not something to worry about (2020)
Author : luu
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-05-21 01:28 UTC (21 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (yarchive.net)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| With PG&E, who needs Carrington Events?
| wcarss wrote:
| I have seen posts and comments about new Carrington events or
| similar with such frequency, over such a period of time, and with
| such uniform distribution along the spectrum from "no problem!"
| to "everyone will die!" that I don't think I can reasonably think
| about it any more, or make good judgements on the validity of the
| arguments.
|
| I've seen physicists, power workers, electricians, congressional
| testimony, and lay loons on all sides over and over, and been
| convinced in opposing ways multiple times. It feels a little bit
| like reading about diets!
|
| Outside of "become a physicist", anyone have any recommendations
| for cutting through the noise on topics like this?
| codezero wrote:
| I'm published in the field of solar physics, though I dropped
| out of getting a PhD. I specialized in space weather modeling,
| and the solar wind specifically, and studied a lot of larger
| flares that were Earth directed. I also dealt with the effects
| of strong solar activity on the spacecraft we used for our
| measurements (noise, downtime, etc...) so I am kind of familiar
| with the subject :)
|
| A significant carrington event, in my opinion, would cause some
| surprising electronic failures, but not likely widespread ones.
|
| The basis for my assumption (and that's all it is) is that
| previous failures of electronic systems because of solar flares
| have happened only on large scale electronics systems (power
| grids) and those systems were older, less shielded, and had bad
| tolerances.
|
| Modern electronics, at least the bulk that are in daily use are
| much more shielded, higher quality, and resilient enough to not
| bring down civilization.
|
| I'd expect it to be something more similar Y2K - definitely hit
| a few people, cost some money here and there, but literally
| everyone on the planet heard about it nonstop for quite some
| time because it _might_ have been bad.
|
| So, I think the tension around this is that, maybe depending on
| how astronomically large the event is, sure, it could be bad,
| like, if it stripped away our magnetosphere permanently
| somehow, yep, that'd suck and probably be a problem for
| humanity, but I find it to be on the unlikely end of things.
|
| So folks aren't crazy for thinking it might cause some trouble,
| maybe even widespread, maybe even apocalyptic, but I think it's
| much more likely it will be an annoying and costly blip for
| most involved.
|
| As an aside, I bet you'd be surprised with how often modern
| hardware has bit flips in memory because of cosmic rays alone,
| and we're mostly OK with that.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Modern electronics, at least the bulk that are in daily use
| are much more shielded, higher quality, and resilient enough
| to not bring down civilization.
|
| Does the same shielding required for consumer electronics to
| meet FCC Class B requirements also protect them from solar
| events?
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I am slightly more pessimistic than you. I would expect it to
| wreak havoc with power grids. There will be widespread power
| outages. As you say, the protection devices should limit the
| amount of serious damage, though there will be some. I expect
| it will take some time to restore power, though, as there
| will be many places where things need to be manually reset:
| hours to days. A few unlucky places may be without power for
| weeks.
|
| Electronics will largely be unaffected unless through bad
| luck of being connected without adequate protection to
| something else that suffers a surge (mains power or wired
| communications).
| drivers99 wrote:
| > I don't think I can reasonably think about it any more, or
| make good judgements on the validity of the arguments
|
| I was about to say the same thing about diets, before I even
| got to when you said:
|
| > It feels a little bit like reading about diets!
|
| It makes me wonder why something like that doesn't have a
| definitive answer, or something to point out which side (or
| both) is wrong, but they seem to be immune to inspection.
| Although, I did read a book called Diet Cults (written by just
| a journalist though) which contradicted all the extreme ones
| and suggested a very moderate approach.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I would expect they don't have very clear cut answers because
| both involve interactions with extremely complex systems that
| no one person is capable of fully understanding.
|
| I don't know the explanations for why we hear such
| conflicting confident answers, but this is my suspicion:
|
| I imagine in both cases the majority of experts in the field
| would provide somewhat nuanced advice, couched in cautions
| about how much about these systems they don't know or fully
| understand. None of those experts break through.
|
| What does break through is all you end up hearing from, which
| is a smaller minority on each side willing to make bold and
| confident predictions.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| A better question to ask might be would you change anything
| about your behavior if either way was correct? I'm not planning
| on digging a bunker and learning subsistence farming and how to
| rebuild civilization so the answer for me is that it really
| doesn't matter if the "everyone will die!" is correct.
| spacemark wrote:
| In the case of a question or topic of research that does not
| yet have a consensus answer among experts, the answer usually
| lies near the median of reasonable expert positions.
|
| Most "news" stories of Carrington Event-type catastrophes are
| not reasonable but sensationalist. Pure speculation to get ad
| revenue. Comments on reddit or various internet fora are about
| as good as Amazon reviews. So your first order of business,
| save becoming an expert yourself, is to discard all commentary
| on Carrington events not produced by those with sufficient
| expertise to illuminate beyond speculation - electrical
| engineers, space weather physicists, etc. That will eliminate
| 99% of page hits on Google, probably.
|
| From what remains you'll find a much smaller range of answers.
| Usually much more boring.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| You are making the middle ground fallacy.
| olivermarks wrote:
| ' Large high-voltage transformers are not things that normally
| wear out. Since they have long service lives, their production is
| quite slow. People speak of lead times of months or years for
| ordering one. I have not looked into this aspect in detail, but
| expect that production could be sped up considerably if need be:
| there's nothing fundamentally difficult about manufacturing a
| transformer, even a high voltage one. Whether, in such an event,
| it actually would be sped up is another matter; highly competent
| people would have to be in charge of the effort, and both our
| political parties are weak on technology.'
|
| There have been historical political efforts to have off line
| back up transformers in place ready in the event of an EMP. also
| fuses built in to protect the transformers from overload. These
| have not got as far as legislation.
| bombcar wrote:
| This type of hand-waiving is amusing coming off a year where we
| couldn't even really speed up something as simple as toilet
| paper production.
| bostonpete wrote:
| ...and yet, we dramatically sped up vaccine development.
| VLM wrote:
| Technically it was only the approval process.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > a year where we couldn't even really speed up something as
| simple as toilet paper production.
|
| The toilet paper was obviously going to be very temporary,
| the total demand for the year would be unchanged. It also
| didn't cause significant problems. Very few people will die
| from lack of toilet paper, so governments aren't going to
| give out emergency subsidies. That makes it very uneconomical
| to scale production up.
|
| The power grid being down is an absolute disaster in most
| highly developed nations that depend on power, so warlike
| resources would be dedicated to addressing the problem.
| However, what I often don't see considered: Lead times are
| months _in a country where everything works_. If the
| transformer factory is without power, without a phone to
| reach the suppliers, and the suppliers are also without
| power, it could be significantly longer, and that ignores the
| general collapse of society that would happen without a power
| grid.
| [deleted]
| lstodd wrote:
| > I have not looked into this aspect in detail, but expect that
| production could be sped up considerably if need be
|
| This sort of ignorance is just sad.
|
| No, there is no way "that production could be sped up
| considerably if need be". None.
|
| And lead times are actually counted in years.
| krisoft wrote:
| Great. Now we have olivermarks speculating that high voltage
| transformer production could be sped up, and lstodd
| vehemently saying the opposite. Could someone please
| substantiate the claims with something verifiable?
| VLM wrote:
| I come from a railroad family four generations and went EE
| so I find things like transporting giant transformers by
| rail to be pretty interesting, since I was a kid. I'm
| probably one of few people who as a kid had a model
| railroad HO scale schnabel car setup, pretty cool, I think
| my dad made it by hand as model railroaders sometimes do.
|
| We have about two dozen schnabel cars in the entire USA and
| they can only roll about 10 MPH.
|
| Luckily they only roll at 10 MPH or so, because RR
| personnel have to do crazy stuff to move oversize loads
| like remove and reinstall traffic lights and occasionally,
| level crossing "arms". Sometimes they have to cut down and
| replace telephone poles and crazy stuff like that.
|
| Logistics has friction and obviously if your entire
| national grid is down you can't haul using electric RR
| engines but USA is mostly diesel anyway. Another friction
| is you need 10 cars for a local event in Florida but
| they're all over the country and the bearings can't roll
| faster than 10 MPH and it takes a long time to cross the
| USA at 10 MPH as the pioneers learned. Another friction is
| they actually use those cars for stuff other than
| carrington event transformer replacements, so taking all
| those cars for replacements for a decade or so means no
| nuclear reactor transport no steel mill roller transport
| etc.
|
| Of course "in reality" it would be easier to massively
| decentralize large transformer production and ship the
| personnel and raw copper on 747s to the site rather than
| now where we centralize production and then ship out. Of
| course we have no experience doing that, but its more
| likely to succeed than trying to ship via rail.
|
| In practice I think the problem with replacing a large
| number of large transformers is we MIGHT be able to do it
| under ideal conditions including full electrical power and
| normal levels of law and order, which we will not have
| after a carrington event.
|
| But for a specific substantial claim, even if we could 3-d
| print or star trek replicator large transformers on demand,
| or even if we had secret government warehouses full of them
| in Nevada, it would take months to years to transport all
| of them to specific sites. SOME work like clearing rights-
| of-way to pass the equipment could be done ahead of time.
| We have SOME ability at heavy mfgr plants like our world
| leading mining equipment plants to build new schnabel cars
| with a lead time of maybe months each. But it would be
| rough.
|
| Anyway you wanted a specific substantiated claim so here it
| is, we can't logistically ship a large number of large
| transformers.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
| chnabel_car#/media/File:CPOX8...
| olivermarks wrote:
| I put the quote about speeding up production etc from the
| parent article in quotes and then commented on it. I also
| posted a link to this paper
|
| https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-98.pdf
|
| my point wasn't about 'speeding up prduction' it was about
| previous political efforts to legislate to have
| transformers offline ready to replace blown ones, GIC
| resistors and most importantly early warning tech to detect
| incoming solar flares and take transformers offline to
| protect them.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Even _if_ the production could be sped up, the transport of the
| things involves complex logistics to get them where they are
| needed because of the weight. You can get a taste of that by
| searching for _transformer heavy transport by ABB_ or something
| like that on youtube. Actually you can partially 'reverse
| engineer' the state of the grid by doing that :-) At least in
| Europe, or Germany. The involved parties, be it manufacturers,
| or logistic companies, or rail nerds have put it all on
| youtube.
|
| Anyways, just transport from factory to destination usually
| takes weeks. Even if only a few 100 kilometers.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I know you are quoting and not claiming but large high voltage
| transformers definitely wear out... They have lifetimes just
| like anything else!I am working on a project replacing a 500kv
| GSU right now.
|
| I am curious what sort of fuse you think would prevent EMP-like
| damage though.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| Why wouldn't a fuse protect from emp-like damage?
|
| My understanding is that an emp introduces electrical
| currents in the lines. Protecting the transformer from
| electrical overloads should protect it from emp. No?
| Animats wrote:
| An EMP attack and a geomagnetic disturbance are completely
| different. EMP events have rise times around 10ns.
| Geomagnetic disturbances have rise times in minutes.
| Xamayon wrote:
| The damage may happen too quickly, similar to how typical
| fuses or circuit breakers won't protect you from a power
| surge or nearby lightning strike. Other tech would probably
| work though. Unfortunately, there's a lot of conflicting
| info on how powerful HEMP attacks, CMEs, etc would be/how
| much protection would be needed to have any effect at all.
| Having reliable info would greatly help for determining the
| feasibility of protecting systems all over the world.
| Regardless of 'criticality' even, as what good would the
| internet be if HN's servers and such are all down? ;)
| jhayward wrote:
| Geomagnetic storms are not EMPs. An EMP is a high-
| frequency, very intense burst in the electric field. A
| geomagnetic storm is a low-frequency, low-intensity change
| in the magnetic field.
|
| The effects of EMPs vs geomagnetics are very different.
| olivermarks wrote:
| https://energsustainsoc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s.
| ..
|
| gic resistors
|
| https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-98.pdf
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think it's worth worrying about if it'll majorly damage the
| entire world's ability to function. Even the gas pipeline hack
| and airline computer systems issues are causing mayhem so
| something larger would be very detrimental to our digital society
| and we should plan accordingly.
| barathr wrote:
| Well, the headline may be wrong due to this very caveat:
|
| > Well, if you have an electrical loop whose size is measured in
| miles, or (better) hundreds of miles, you can pick up enough
| current to matter. The telegraph stations were like that.
|
| There's new research coming out in a few months on this question
| -- how such an event may take out transoceanic Internet
| connectivity:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/sangeetha_a_j/status/138930329505...
| Animats wrote:
| As I've done before, when this came up, I've aimed people at the
| PJM Interconnect's training materials on this. Here's the
| simplified version.[1]
|
| Here's the more advanced version.[2] This discusses the
| Carrington event, the Hydro Quebec event of March 13, 1989, and
| what PJM does when there's a problem.
|
| The effect of a geomagnetic disturbance is that DC currents
| appear between distant points that are earth-grounded. This is
| caused by the ionized solar wind flowing through the space
| between power lines and the ground. Current flow through a loop
| generates voltage, remember. That puts DC currents into AC
| transformers, which can cause partial magnetic saturation, which
| makes the coils a resistive load for part of the cycle, which
| causes heating. Transformer damage is possible if power levels
| are not reduced. That happened to two transformers in 1989. The
| DC currents aren't huge; 10 amps is enough to cause trouble.
|
| So, PJM now has DC ground current meters at a few key points.
| These report to the system control centers (they have two, just
| in case), where operators can take actions to reduce power flows
| at the vulnerable points. In [2], there's considerable detail
| about this. ("The procedure is implemented when a DC measurement
| of 10 amps or greater is detected at either Missouri Ave or
| Meadowbrook. Reduce Salem 1 & 2 units to 80% power, and Hope
| Creek to 85% power ...")
|
| Journalists and pundits writing on this subject should read that
| before writing. If you don't understand it, find and take the
| "PJM 101" online training course. PJM's materials are written for
| the people who run the system, and there's little nonsense or
| hype.
|
| The reports go out to anyone who gets PJM alerts. Those have been
| on the web for years. Since the last time I looked at this,
| they've added apps for IOS and Android. Since energy traders need
| this info, PJM lets anybody view it.
|
| [1] https://insidelines.pjm.com/geomagnetic-disturbance-what-
| is-...
|
| [2] https://pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-
| certifications/trans-e...
| bogrollben wrote:
| The fact that Texas crashed so severely over snow this year makes
| me think all bets are off with another Carrington Event that
| could potentially impact an entire continent.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I have seen reports that there were spontaneous fires all over
| the US midwest, during the event, all reported only locally
| because nobody collected those stats then.
|
| I don't know why such an event would affect only part of one
| continent, unless (say) the Earth's field touched down only there
| and in unpopulated areas.
| bombcar wrote:
| It makes sense on the surface that it may only affect the side
| of the world "facing the sun" at the time, and if reports were
| only local it might be hard to find any reports in more
| sparsely populated areas.
|
| Anytime we look back into history to try to find an event that
| wasn't noticed at the time we're going to be dealing with
| spotty records. It's hard enough finding evidence of tsunamis,
| and this is much less noticeable.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| There is something off about the numbers. Ordinary, day to day
| auroras can locally reverse the magnetic field. So, maybe the
| average change was less than 10% of the average magnetic field,
| but I've no doubt that local variation can be much, much higher.
|
| And reading further down, the article claims the change in
| magnetic field is slow. It's not. It's very fast.
|
| The article does not get the basic physics correct. The one thing
| that is correct is that it is unlikely to damage your cell phone.
| What will happen is that massive currents will be induced in
| transmission lines blowing up transformers and possibly damaging
| anything plugged into mains.
| altcognito wrote:
| The more localized the change in the magnetic field, the less
| it matters.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Localised is relative. We're still talking about currents
| circling a significant portion of the planet twisting back
| and forth.
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