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Comment by mullen | Hacker News Reader

>Even now, the center's Bogdan said, the most damaging emissions from big storms travel slowly enough to be detected by sun-watching satellites well before the particles strike Earth. "That gives us [about] 20 hours to determine what actions we need to take," Viereck said.

>In a pinch, power companies could protect valuable transformers by taking them offline before the storm strikes. That would produce local blackouts, but they wouldn't last for long.

>"The good news is that these storms tend to pass after a couple of hours," Bogdan added.

Simple. Turn everything off. Going without power for a few hours is not as a big deal that everyone makes it out to be.

All of San Diego lost power for about 8 hours a few years back and it taught me one thing; losing power for less than 12 hours is not really that much of an issue. I think San Diego could have made 24 hours with little trouble.

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Losing the power grid is different than going without electricity. Odds are that when San Diego was without power, places like hospitals were running close to normal using their own generators. Taking those offline is a much bigger deal and almost certainly would require sacrificing human lives that would be saved with electricity. It is much harder to make a proactive decision like turning off the power when it comes at the cost of human life.

If we are serious about addressing these risks however, the cost of hardening only critical electrical infrastructure that we can't turn off, like hospitals, ATC, nuclear power plant control systems, should be a lot less than hardening everything.

But a poster above pointed out we (US, via Congress) aren't even willing to spend ~$3B hardening the power grid. That seems like a pretty low ball number; I'd imagine shielding just the things you mentioned would cost at least that much.

Valid point. Although if I'm a hospital administrator and give X dollars for disaster preparedness I would spend that money on something that has a higher likelihood of saving lives than solar storm preparedness. That is the problem with these incredibly rare but highly destructive events. Do you spend $1 million to definitely save 10 lives or do you spend that $1 million on something which has the 0.01% chance of saving 100,000 lives?

Nuclear power plants have a safety mode. Airplanes can be landed and turned off. ATC can be turned off after the planes have landed. Hospitals would be tricky because some electronic devices do not a manual labor replacement and I think there would be deaths related to a forced blackout.

The only thing that I could think of off the top of my mind would be satellites and ships at sea.

I will admit, it would be a rough couple of days afterwards as we figured out what survived and what did not. But I don't think it would be catastrophic.

> Turn everything off.

Speaking of that, and addressing a concern I've seen in places:

The way I understand the physics involved here, it should be indeed enough to power off things and unplug from AC, copper networking, and any other long cables. It would not be necessary to put electronics in Faraday cages.

Unless we're talking about RF receivers, in which case I'm not sure. I guess they should be fine if not connected to long antenna wires.

Something to consider is that during normal blackouts, critical things like hospitals have backup power. If this happened, they would have no option but to turn on the generators and pray. Most will lose their backup power unless unless their systems are designed to survive an EMP blast.

What happens to all the power being generated by all the wind farms, solar cells, and nuclear and coal plants (and hydroelectric?)? My understanding is that those can't go on- and off-line rapidly (one of the big advantages of natural gas plants). Is there a way to "ground" the excess, or does that end up causing problems with over-supply in the parts of the grid still online?

Also, won't the flux from the solar storm cause current to flow through power lines, regardless of what is actually connected? I suppose the transformers would still be protected, but there may still be damage to grid.

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