Jul 28 2009

Solar Hurricanes: The Trillion Dollar Threat

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

If you want to take your mind off the bad economy and global warming, try thinking instead about the possible collapse of advanced industrial civilization in the northern hemisphere.

Like Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, this disaster scenario involves a storm--but on the sun, not on earth. Katrina cost the country around $100 billion. A really bad geomagnetic storm, the solar equivalent of a hurricane, could wipe out major portions of North America's power grid, costing upward of $2 trillion in the first year alone, and requiring up to a decade for full recovery.

And that's not counting the effects on Europe, China and Russia.

That estimate was published earlier this year by the National Academy of Science in a sober but terrifying report, Severe Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts.

Most of us know that space weather can disrupt radio communications and, on rare occasions, even put satellites at risk. A solar storm in 1994 knocked a Canadian telecommunications satellite out of service for six months at a cost of more than $50 million; one in 2003 disrupted a Federal Aviation Administration GPS system for 30 hours; and another in 2005 forced the diversion of 26 United Airlines flights to avoid radio blackouts. Satellite disruptions caused by solar storms cost the government about $100 million a year, the Department of Defense estimates.

But the sun's fury occasionally hits much closer to home. On March 13, 1989, as horrified grid operators watched alarms go off, voltage surges extinguished power to all of Quebec province. Six million people lost service for nine hours--some for days.

The cause was a blob of plasma--superhot charged particles--blasted from the sun at a speed of several hundred miles per second. Weighing billions of tons, such eruptions cause havoc with orbiting electrical equipment, the Earth's ionosphere, and, in severe cases like 1989, electrical grids on the ground that act like giant receiving antennas.

Last year, the National Research Council convened a workshop to assess how vulnerable power grids remain to extreme space weather events since the 1989 outage.

The gathered scientists and policymakers noted that the 1989 storm was only one-tenth as strong as a megastorm that raged in May 1921. Both were dwarfed by an even mightier storm that struck in 1859. The latter superstorm produced bright red and green aurora lights over Cuba, wreaked havoc with the Earth's magnetic field and electrocuted telegraph operators.

A study presented by Metatech Corporation estimated that a storm like the one in 1921 could fry several hundred power transformers essential to grid operations and black out power to more than 130 million people in North America. (Northern latitudes--especially Canada, the upper Midwest and the East Coast--would be much more vulnerable than California.)

Here's how a report in New Scientist magazine describes what would happen next:

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. . . . supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. . . something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. . . . 

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US.

As the National Research Council committee concluded, "A quantitative and comprehensive assessment of the societal and economic impacts of severe space weather will be a truly daunting task."

Tomorrow: What is being done to prepare?

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