8 ms·

Solar storm of 1859

109 points by nhkssol 8y ago

nhkssol 8y ago
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%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk...
- starbeast 8y ago
  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.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Pouring gigawatts of laser light through fiber sounds pretty hard, especially if you want to have electricity for the end consumer, not light.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      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.
      - api 8y ago
        If laser efficiency were good enough for this we would have laser fusion.
        starbeast 8y ago
        I didn't realise that the laser's inherent inefficiency was the main loss in laser fusion, though it would make sense.
        api 8y ago
        Laser fusion is not over-unity because lasers are horribly inefficient. If lasers were significantly better we could generate fusion power by repeatedly laser-imploding pellets of D-T fuel. We can already generate fusion this way but it takes more power to run the lasers than you get from the fusion (after conversion losses).
        starbeast 8y ago
        That's interesting. So effectively, laser fusion shifts the problem domain into making a better laser, rather than all the tedious mucking about with plasma confinement. Will be interesting to see which problem is more tractable in the long run. Efficient lasers presumably have many more commercial applications than good plasma confinement does, though I could be very wrong about that. Given that the universe appears to have a sense of humour, efficient lasers will probably require progress in good plasma confinement.
        api 8y ago
        Yes, though there are some other problems too. Laser fusion basically gives you a series of small thermonuclear blasts. There are ways of confining these (like doing them underwater) and extracting heat/power, but a real power plant would probably take some engineering and might have to be rather large. You could think of such a power plant as something like a thermonuclear internal combustion engine with laser spark plugs. Actually I wonder if giant pistons similar to the huge diesels built by Wartsila and others for container ships could work. Put some water in there with the fuel pellet and the water would be flash vaporized by the fusion yield. You'd be talking about a pretty massive engine bore, probably much larger than those monster diesels. Might be worth doing for sheer awesomeness. :) I don't know the numbers but my guess is that lasers would have to be dramatically more efficient than they are today for this to be a practical and economical way of generating power.
  - cesarb 8y ago
    High power on a fiber has a problem called "fiber fuse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      >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.
  - Scaevolus 8y ago
    https://www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html 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.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      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-21-5-6233 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 http://optics.org/news/6/6/20 edit2 - https://www.novuslight.com/hollow-core-fiber-breakthrough_N8471.html https://www.novuslight.com/hollow-core-fiber-breakthrough_N8...
  - extrapickles 8y ago
    You can buy power over fiber systems, but they are not cheap! Last I checked it was something like $100/watt and was 10-25% efficient (plug-plug). The system I worked on used “standard” fiber as the hollow core stuff still had too many drawbacks.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      I have been wondering about doing power over fiber for sensors, where they don't need much power, but do need an interference free supply. It seems like a good use case as you could presumably put a sensor at the end of a single fiber, then send power up and get data back down.
dmix 8y ago
> 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
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  It's stochastic. Could happen tomorrow. We got lucky in 2012. [1] [1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    > On July 23, 2012 a "Carrington-class" solar superstorm (solar flare, coronal mass ejection, solar EMP) was observed; its trajectory missed Earth in orbit. Information about these observations was first shared publicly by NASA on April 28, 2014 Why would NASA not share this with the public?
    - lolc 8y ago
      Oh NASA did share the event at the time: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/fast-cme.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/fast-cme.html They just didn't realize the magnitude.
itronitron 8y ago
are there any data centers that are shielded from this sort of event?
- hexane360 8y ago
  All of them. This wouldn't affect low power equipment, only transmission over long distances. As others have noted, it's not an EMP.
mabbo 8y ago
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.
altitudinous 8y ago
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.
- lolc 8y ago
  > more real risk What's not real about the threat of nuclear bombs?
- macca321 8y ago
  Would it 'destroy' capitalism and commerce, or just set it back some number of years?
jefftk 8y ago
David Roodman wrote an excellent 4-part analysis of risks from geomagnetic storms for the givewell blog: https://blog.givewell.org/tag/geomagnetic-storms/ https://blog.givewell.org/tag/geomagnetic-storms/
- greesil 8y ago
  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."
Animats 8y ago
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-exam-materials/gof/20160104-conservative-operations.ashx?la=en https://pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/gen-exa...
- shubhamjain 8y ago
  Potentially off-topic, but you how do you know so much? It seems that from law to physics to computer science, you have an absurd level of detailed knowledge. It's incredulous that someone can talk at such great depth about an obscure topic from the top of his head.
weavejester 8y ago
Ars Technica had a longer article on this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-stormthe-week-the-sun-touched-the-earth/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-...
lgats 8y ago
What satellite companies and energy providers should I be prepared to short in the event we are expecting another solar storm of this magnitude?

109 points by nhkssol 8y ago

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%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk...

starbeast 8y ago
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.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Pouring gigawatts of laser light through fiber sounds pretty hard, especially if you want to have electricity for the end consumer, not light.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    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.
    - api 8y ago
      If laser efficiency were good enough for this we would have laser fusion.
      - starbeast 8y ago
        I didn't realise that the laser's inherent inefficiency was the main loss in laser fusion, though it would make sense.
        api 8y ago
        Laser fusion is not over-unity because lasers are horribly inefficient. If lasers were significantly better we could generate fusion power by repeatedly laser-imploding pellets of D-T fuel. We can already generate fusion this way but it takes more power to run the lasers than you get from the fusion (after conversion losses).
        starbeast 8y ago
        That's interesting. So effectively, laser fusion shifts the problem domain into making a better laser, rather than all the tedious mucking about with plasma confinement. Will be interesting to see which problem is more tractable in the long run. Efficient lasers presumably have many more commercial applications than good plasma confinement does, though I could be very wrong about that. Given that the universe appears to have a sense of humour, efficient lasers will probably require progress in good plasma confinement.
        api 8y ago
        Yes, though there are some other problems too. Laser fusion basically gives you a series of small thermonuclear blasts. There are ways of confining these (like doing them underwater) and extracting heat/power, but a real power plant would probably take some engineering and might have to be rather large. You could think of such a power plant as something like a thermonuclear internal combustion engine with laser spark plugs. Actually I wonder if giant pistons similar to the huge diesels built by Wartsila and others for container ships could work. Put some water in there with the fuel pellet and the water would be flash vaporized by the fusion yield. You'd be talking about a pretty massive engine bore, probably much larger than those monster diesels. Might be worth doing for sheer awesomeness. :) I don't know the numbers but my guess is that lasers would have to be dramatically more efficient than they are today for this to be a practical and economical way of generating power.
- cesarb 8y ago
  High power on a fiber has a problem called "fiber fuse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    >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.
- Scaevolus 8y ago
  https://www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html 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.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    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-21-5-6233 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 http://optics.org/news/6/6/20 edit2 - https://www.novuslight.com/hollow-core-fiber-breakthrough_N8471.html https://www.novuslight.com/hollow-core-fiber-breakthrough_N8...
- extrapickles 8y ago
  You can buy power over fiber systems, but they are not cheap! Last I checked it was something like $100/watt and was 10-25% efficient (plug-plug). The system I worked on used “standard” fiber as the hollow core stuff still had too many drawbacks.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    I have been wondering about doing power over fiber for sensors, where they don't need much power, but do need an interference free supply. It seems like a good use case as you could presumably put a sensor at the end of a single fiber, then send power up and get data back down.

dmix 8y ago

> 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

ridgeguy 8y ago
It's stochastic. Could happen tomorrow. We got lucky in 2012. [1] [1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
- wallace_f 8y ago
  > On July 23, 2012 a "Carrington-class" solar superstorm (solar flare, coronal mass ejection, solar EMP) was observed; its trajectory missed Earth in orbit. Information about these observations was first shared publicly by NASA on April 28, 2014 Why would NASA not share this with the public?
  - lolc 8y ago
    Oh NASA did share the event at the time: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/fast-cme.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/fast-cme.html They just didn't realize the magnitude.

itronitron 8y ago

are there any data centers that are shielded from this sort of event?

hexane360 8y ago
All of them. This wouldn't affect low power equipment, only transmission over long distances. As others have noted, it's not an EMP.

mabbo 8y ago

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.

altitudinous 8y ago

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.

lolc 8y ago
> more real risk What's not real about the threat of nuclear bombs?
macca321 8y ago
Would it 'destroy' capitalism and commerce, or just set it back some number of years?

jefftk 8y ago

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

greesil 8y ago
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."

Animats 8y ago

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-exam-materials/gof/20160104-conservative-operations.ashx?la=en https://pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/gen-exa...

shubhamjain 8y ago
Potentially off-topic, but you how do you know so much? It seems that from law to physics to computer science, you have an absurd level of detailed knowledge. It's incredulous that someone can talk at such great depth about an obscure topic from the top of his head.

weavejester 8y ago

Ars Technica had a longer article on this: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-stormthe-week-the-sun-touched-the-earth/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-...

lgats 8y ago

What satellite companies and energy providers should I be prepared to short in the event we are expecting another solar storm of this magnitude?