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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)

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.

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.