Note: A number of people sent this to me. This is a fictional account of what might happen if we get a large solar event, such as a Coronal Mass Ejection, pointed directly at earth.
Given that we are truly an electric society, the havoc it would cause would be monumental. Few systems are hardened against an event like this. It would be like a nuclear EMP event, except worldwide.
When the ejection reaches the Earth as an ICME (Interplanetary CME), it may disrupt the Earth’s magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the nightside, it creates trillions of watts of power which is directed back toward the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This process can cause particularly strong aurora also known as the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis (in the Northern Hemisphere), and the Southern Lights, or aurora australis (in the Southern Hemisphere). CME events, along with solar flares, can disrupt radio transmissions, cause power outages (blackouts), and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission lines.
Bye bye modern society. While the sun is quiet now, don’t discount the potential for something like this to happen. The likelihood of such an event is far greater than that of an asteroid strike. If it does happen, the only electronics likely to be working afterward are tube radios, and a 57 Chevy or earlier automobile. (no electronics, just electromechanical). – Anthony
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
From the New Scientist 23 March 2009 by Michael Brooks
IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world’s telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, “we haven’t found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event”, says James Green, head of NASA’s planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. “From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we’d want to survive.” However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
The second problem is the grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. “It’s just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters,” says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. “Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions.”
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
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. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that 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.
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P. Hager (17:06:44) :
Thanks for the details — interesting.
The coal plant I worked at in the east US was the first in line to be restarted from a system-wide failure. Simulations were performed regularly and even one “real” run. A nearby 60MW hydro dam would supply auxiliary power to restart that coal plant, which in turn would supply power for restarting a somewhat larger & relatively nearby plant, and so on.
We once had to replace a 250MW, 15.5kv/138kv main transformer due to core-insulation breakdown (and resultant hydrogen generation). We used an ancient Westinghouse spare transformer until the new one arrived from Switzerland about 16 months later. I’m not sure if any 200MW+ transformers are currently built in the US.
Interesting article.
No doubt the consequences will be serious, if such an event occurs. It would seem that taking judicious measures to prepare for such an eventuality are more important than building windmills.
I was struck by the article’s structure. It seems it was written from a viewpoint that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And in the recovery, anything that can go right, won’t.
Curious, really curious … did they consult a Mayan calendar when they came up with that date of the event as being in 2012?
Leon Brozyna (09:14:44) :
“Curious, really curious … did they consult a Mayan calendar when they came up with that date of the event as being in 2012?”
That could have more to do with NASA’s predicted timetable of the Solar Cycle 24 maximum. Search for the entry on this site from March 8, 2009 titled “More Revisions to the NASA solar sycle prediction”. With this unprecedented deep solar minimum we’re currently experiencing, they keep extending their predictions further into the future. Although their latest date for the solar max is Jan -Feb 2013, just before that the prediction was for our favorite month: Dec 2012. It’s likely that at some time in the last few months, the prediction would have been for Sept 2012, as implied in the Elephant’s Butt article above. One of the legitimate solar scientists here may correct me.
I talked with a man who owns a machine shop locally and works on very large welders that make ships and such. He makes $300 an hour fixing computer controlled welding machines.
He thinks he could make a large transformer in a week in his shop from the time he picked up the phone to when it was done.
Given the large scale resources of much larger shops that he consults for, he thinks its 2-5 days.
The big problem is getting the materials and people together along with the power to run the tools.
If everything is down, then he said they’d have to find a navy ship or working coal plant and move the machine tools and people then build the stuff.
There are literally thousands of small machine shops around the US and hundreds of larger ones.
Its just a matter of getting the materials to the right people and supervising the work.
Who keeps approving these ‘thomaspeep’ comments anyway? Someone there in moderatorville undergo a mind transplant in the last day? [grin]
REPLY: I’m going to blanket delete those. – Anthony
THEN he has to hipot (high potential) test it … can you say 375 or 500 KV?
And this is if he can get the HV rated insulators, the oil, construct the insulating oil/fluid cooling subsystem.
These aren’t going to be the neighborhood “distribution” transformers, these will be the transformers used in “transmission” applications (as seen in SUBSTATIONS) some standing a couple stories tall and requiring transport by rail …
Ridiculous! Does anyone remember how fast all those oil well fires were put out in Kuwait? It was predicted it would take many years. They got it done within a year and a half. One Wiki article references a team using jet turbines to put out the fires. That is innovation! Those lost transformers would be rebuilt in unheard of “record time”. There would be crews working around the clock in the whole country, rain or shine. The most offensive comment of all “America might never recover”, what a bunch of b…!
You are forgetting that most of the technology required to manufacture those transformers will also be disabled. Try to look past your rose colored glasses and look at the big picture. Jeess, The lack of logic and reason in some people is incomprehendable.
Ron de Haan (03:55:16) :
I wonder what will happen to:
1. windmills
2. solar panels
3. satellites
I also wonder the cause of death of “millions of Americans” as stated in the posting?
The cause would be the breakdown of almost all basic infrastructure. Suddenly no
water, electricity for basic functions, gas, you name it. Almost all major cities require
electricity to provide water. When elec is out, water is not far behind. Most humans would die of thirst in less than a week without water. You could drink almost any source of water, but that would only extend things a little while, because of bacteria and other water borne diseases.
You aren’t/we aren’t going to have a ‘bunch of blown [transmission] transformers’, so we may all put those thoughts to rest, for reasons I posted further up.
I am CONSTANTLY amazed that the public thinks these ‘systems’ are just running staticly with NO supervision or monitoring; tell me, people, do you watch your engine lights? Generator/Alternator? Temperture? GAS GUAGE?
I wonder, was the post about “PGM (Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland Interconnection) [Generation and Distribution System] Operator Training and Practices” overlooked?
??????
Leif
Thanks again for all your patience in explaining the science to the laity. You have demonstrated far more patience than I ever could & I appreciate even more how reasonable you were with some of my more harebrained questions.
I’m sure this has been mentioned before but it occurs to me that we have two different departments of NASA – GISS & Marshall – that are strongly pushing the equivalent of complex thermal fluid dynamic models that promise predictive forecasting but continue to fall short. If any single one of my systems projects ever came up as short as their predictions I would’ve abandoned my development strategies long ago. There’ve been times when the net effect of all my various subsystems and functions ended up delivering the wrong output. At first flush the output seemed OK, but then subsequent sanity checks and wider parameters showed there was some kind of unanticipated compounding effect that piled up (particularly in recursions and networked relationships that lent to feedback).
There’s nothing wrong a functional prototype & calling it a lesson learned, but there are times I had to decide to scratch it & go back the old drawing board.
As for the problem of a large CME (is there a scale for these things ala Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Meteors and bears oh my?) couldn’t the existing grid be retrofit so that it’s keyed into space weather data, using automated breakers to not only prevent such damage to transformers, but to simply interrupt the antenna-like amplification of the long-distance high-tension parts of the grid?
This is one matter where I find myself agreeing with the Obama admin., we need a smart grid & it’s a good investment for reasons outside of renewables & power banking. If we’re going to make the grid that much more interdependent, then it darn well better be a very smart grid indeed.
Thanks again….
And somehow all circuit breakers, overcurrent switches, fuses, spark gaps, lightning strike suppressors, and other multiply redundant protection devices would all fail to perform their function ?…
If it does happen, the only electronics likely to be working afterward are tube radios, and a 57 Chevy or earlier automobile. (no electronics, just electromechanical). – Anthony
Along with a heck of a lot of mid-1980’s Mercedes and some similar era cars and trucks with all mechanical Diesels. I have 2.
BTW, I think the compounded tipping point failure scenario is way overdone.
Yeah, a big EMP would be a mess, but end of life as we know it? Probably not. For example, my Honda 1 kw generator might be dead due to the built in diode / inverter setup, but my 4 kw (Coleman? – something with a Briggs & Stratton on it) would be fine. With that, I can get the local gas station going, who can then keep it going along with a bunch of cars & trucks. Begin bootstrap…
And those big commercial sized portable generators are mostly all mechanical Diesels, again no problem. Hospital standby generators? Same thing. Good old mechanical Diesels. Maybe the electronic autostart boxes would be fried, but put battery to starter motor and it’s going to run (and an EMP will not fry the battery or starter circuits).
Add in the fact that all the military gear is EMP rated and most of the trucking is via Diesels, and there are lots of standby generators kicking about (I ran an entire data center on two industrial sized ones for a few weeks while we were bringing it up, since the electric company could not provide power on our schedule…) Certainly there is enough standby power to get critical services like hospitals, police, and yes, oil refineries and pipelines running. Most of those facilities have them already installed (hospitals by law, with a mandatory testing interval with live cutover). A hugh number of data centers have them. Every emergency command center. A tour of many major office buildings will turn up a couple of these in the corner of the basement somewhere that only the facilities guys or the data center guys care about.
Also, the comment that you can’t bring up a nuke unless the grid is live sounds fishy to me. Yes, you must sync them, but that is no different from any other major generator. Also, the big hydro sites ought to do just fine being buried under mountains of dirt. For most cases, the lightning arrestors and circuit breakers / surge protectors ought to protect everything. Yeah, a few will fry because the arrestor didn’t, but not the 100% the article implies. So for California, I’d figure about 50% power would survive fairly easily (nuke, hydro) with lots of backup diesels (with a few days to weeks of fuel). More than enough to keep the fuel systems and emergency systems working, including water. The grid would likely be segmented due to transformer outages, but it can run that way. Especially with all the TVs fried 😉
Oh, and there are a fair number of hand driven fuel transfer pumps. Certainly enough to lift enough fuel to get the emergency generators running enough to run the electric lift pumps. Farm country has lots of these mounted on pickup trucks and farm fuel bunkers. So do some smaller marinas. Many mechanics have them to move waste oil between collectors and storage tanks. So I don’t see the “can’t get fuel to move” problem being real. (Even ignoring the kilotons of fuel in transit in fuel delivery trucks at any one time… and all the above ground tank farms at refineries…)
And while I can’t imagine what an EMP would break in a Diesel-Electric train engine, it won’t be the Diesel and those motors are both pretty well shielded and have very high current ratings. The engine housing ought to act as a Faraday cage and protect it and all the wiring. So maybe you would have to crowbar your way past some cab electronics to get it started and moving, but nothing a rail mechanic couldn’t get done pretty directly. And maybe for a couple of months it would be back to 30 MPH and waving kerosene lanterns for signals, but emergency goods would move.
Same thing for ships. There is a lot of steel between that engine and the sky… So maybe the ship can’t do computer navigation and fingertip steering, it can still move and you can set up a “shouting bridge” to carry commands from Captain to Engineer until the fancy stuff is fixed. I know sailors who still practice with compass and sextant and frankly, it’s not that hard to do dead reckoning in sight of land – I did it all the time when I was a live aboard on a sailboat… which, BTW, had an auxiliary Diesel with a hand crank for emergencies if you lost ALL electric power including starter & battery.
Most Diesels need NO electricity at all to start or run. Just crank them over… I had a Nissan inline 6 in an International truck that had the alternator die. Ran it for about 4 months without the alternator. Parked on a decent slope I could start it with the key out. (Manual fuel cut off). FWIW, the 1980s Mercedes has a vacuum line to the key to control engine off, not electrical. In many cases if you have an electric pintle fuel cutoff you can bypass it by removing the solenoid and filing off the pintle. (You would then need to manually cut off the fuel to stop the engine…)
Oh, and any electronics in a metal shipping container ought to be Faraday cage safe too. (Heck, a radio in a tin box ought to be safe…) so there will be lots of gear that works inside metal boxes all over the place. It’s not like there will be NO electronics.
Yeah, it would be a mess; but no, it would not be an unrecoverable doomsday…
There would be a lot of relatively new cars with fried radios and some with fried transmission computers and fried fuel injection systems, but there are still a lot of cars with older mechanical stuff. (1979 Merc 230 was carbs and I think they had mechanical fuel injection into the 1980s). But even for the new ones, many would be parked in underground garages and deep in parking structures. EMP is not magical and attenuates rapidly in rebar and concrete…
We as a society could function with only 10% of the private cars (who would instantly be making money as taxis 😎 And I have to add that even the newer cars might not be as prone to dying as folks think. I’m fairly certain the Hummer had to pass EMP acceptance to become a military vehicle as did the older GM trucks they replaced. Tranny controller chips inside the metal case ought to be shielded. Hood, body, and grill with engine surround a lot of under the hood electronics. Unlike the “car zappers” that run UNDER the car, a CME will arrive from overhead. Most electronics in cars will be behind a layer of steel from that point of view.
Oh, and major industrial refrigerators ought to be fine, too. Between the ones that have lots of metal around them and the ones that are heat driven rather than electrical, and the ones inside rebar and concrete or under metal roofs; certainly enough to keep some food moving. (And it would not take long for folks like me to break out our “How to Dry Vegetables & Make Jerky” books and start classes, if it came to that.) Again, maybe a real PITA, but not unworkable. You can live a long time on oatmeal and dried peas. You may not be happy, but you’ll live.
Maybe it was living through a couple of disasters (including a 7+ quake with a data center in a mess and businesses shutdown for several days); but what I see is people quickly adapt and get by. One neighbor fires up the BBQ but has no meat, while the other brings the steaks (since the fridge is out) but has no stove, and we have a block party. Heck, on the way home (I was about 15 miles out when it hit…) there was one intersection with a bike rider complete in yellow spandex directing traffic; the next had a business lady in grey suit / skirt directing traffic. People just did what needed doing.
And that is what we would do again.
Reply: We had a block party too during Loma Prieta. Our party apparently made national news from a helicopter shot according to my girlfriend at the time who told me she viewed our house on tv from Connecticut. “San Franciscans seem to be taking it in stride was the story.” ~ charles the moderator
Reply: I drive a 1970 Bronco myself ~ charles the moderator
REPLY: I think you’ll find a few transistors or diodes in there somewhere…bzzzt! – Anthony
It it’s like the Bronco my neighbor had in about ’73? it was carburetor / points. No electronics. The 1979 Merc 230 is carb /points, no electronics ( I own one being made workable…) Similarly, my old 1967 VW was carb / points and I see a fair number of them still running about. Oh, and my (now dead) 1986 Honda was carb / points. Don’t think it had any electronics in the running gear… I had the “vacuum control box hose monster from hell” IIRC with a zillion little bits of black spaghetti running all over 8-} Also Mercedes at least had a long affair with mechanical fuel injection. Don’t know when it ran out, but I’ve found web references at least into the mid ’70s and Bosch was used on BMW and some Alpha Romeo’s as well.
Looking it over at:
http://www.iterasi.net/openviewer.aspx?sqrlitid=kkijzew8_u-vadasoks0rq
it has an electric high pressure fuel pump (that looks to be metal encased) and I can see no electronics in it. While these folks:
http://unwiredtools.com/utcis.asp
make an adapter to bring “modern engine management” (i.e. electronics) to a system that isn’t broken… and they have a chart showing application to the Bosch system into the early 1980’s on many makers cars.
If it has mechanical injection and points it ought to survive.
If it has electronic ignition, just get an old points based distributor for the survival kit and your a few bolts and timing adjustment away from running again…
(Not that I have anything against the ’57 Chevy, but I liked the 68 Dodge Dart better and it was all mechanical all the time too 😉
Basically, it wasn’t until about the mid-to-late ’80s that electronic stuff started hitting hard and you can still find lots of nice drivable cars and trucks with no computer in them and no engine electronics.
Couple that with a days/several days notice of/that [a high probability of] ‘charged particles’ [are] about to pass by/pass into the earth’s magnetosphere and those larger segments of the THE GRID (called “interties”, ties between areas that can stand independently from a generation standpoint, but may/usually are tied together owing to the economics of generation and reliability -referred to in the literature as “power system security”- economics e. g. the cheapest which is hydro-based generation which is usually located MUCH further away compared to next-to-cheapest easier to locate-near-pop-centers coal plants) can be broken up so’s the GICs won’t/aren’t able to have the detrimental effects they otherwise could have …
Sitting ducks we are not.
No diodes in the alternator? What kind of “voltage regulator” controlled the alternator – mech or solid-state?
o 1965 Plymouth Satellite Sebring: diodes in alternator (I know for a fact; in the process of fooling around with the mechanical alternator voltage regulator I blew one of those diodes and had to effect repair)
o 1972 A Plymouth Satellite Sebring I owned had electronic ignition (no points) wherein the firing point was controlled by the ‘reluctor’ in the distributor. Contast that with a ’71 Plymouth same body style that had points and with which I used a CDI (capacitive discharge ignition) kit, which is still out in my garage. (Granted, this was not a computerized ignition, but rather the solid-state equivalent of the point system.) That 1972 Plymouth also had a Solid-state Alternator controller/regulator
o 1975 Ford Pinto bought new by a friend: had Ford factory electronic ignition module, they were prone to failure so he carried a spare – which was fortunate as on one long trip the original died at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere …
o 1978 Ford Pinto I bought used in 1979 had electronic ignition as well. Not a computer mind you, but solid-state (“transistorized”).
o 1978 Plymoyth Volare I owned used an analog-based ‘Spark Control Computer’ ignition system termed the “Lean-Burn System”. Introduced in 1976 (come to find out) according to: http://www.allpar.com/mopar/lean-burn.html
Paper, four generations of Chrysler electronic engine controls:
http://ntlsearch.bts.gov/tris/record/tris/00380939.html
Bill P (14:45:16) : My understanding is that a few, strategically ground-based nuclear weapons, or a single, high-altitude burst would accomplish the same thing that the writer describes so well above.
Substantially correct. A nuke in the ionosphere works best (as I understand it) and the EMP is “line of sight”, so basically anything line of sight from a 400 mile up ionospheric blast gets an EMP that fries ordinary electronics. This is why mil spec gear goes off to a desert somewhere to be parked under a big magnet and pulsed before acceptance.
Any nuke will do, it’s where you set it off that matters (though I’m sure boutique bomb designers can enhance any particular effect).
If, as stated, an electromagnetic pulse is a catastophic event for developed countries, it would seem a natural choice for terrorists, who would love to see the Great Satan hoist on the petard of its own technology.
And this is why we get all worked up over Korea sending a suborbital missle at Hawaii or Iran putting up a “scientific” rocket in LEO. It is also why (as one of the folks slated to “put it all back together after the awshit breaks it”) I went out of my way to aquire 3 vehicles that are immune to EMP and never personally depend on any vehicle with a computer in it. (And have a fuel storage system and 2 generators and food for a few months and…) The #4 vehicle MIGHT survive (Mercedes SL with mechanical injection) but might need a swap of distributor to non-electronic: but I WANTED the car and had 3 backups already 😎
My present paranoid moment is exactly that scenario. Iran gets a Pakistani style nuke and sets it off 400 miles up over Chicago… Then says “Ops, sorry, looks like our power supply failed”. They will do this as soon as they can, given my read of their appocolypic death wish.
There are a lot of folks like me and Frank Perdicaro (11:23:22) who are quietly prepared and hope we never need to do anything more interesting than sell the gear at a yard sale in 20 years.
Notice that most of the power fries transformers on lines running east west. There will be lots of gear on N/S lines not fried. Also the power will be nodal. It will fry one transformer, but not another. Also as spots fry, the network segments and no longer has the same harmonics. Basically, you end up with a lot of fried parts in a segmented grid, but with lots of perfectly fine parts scattered through it too. Yeah, you have to start putting it back together from junk, but it will be done. You start at a working generator and “build back out” salvaging parts as you go.
Also realize that If I needed to provide emergency lighting to my block, I could just bypass the transformer, pop the breakers that segment my block from the grid, and run a small segment at low volts. I could build a 4 kw 240 v “mini-grid” for my block in about 1 afternoon. Nobody could use more than about 100w at a time, but it would give everyone 2 compact lights and a hand tool or two as needed. A rotating schedule would let folks run a major appliance (washer?) once a week. Now with my mechanic neighbors shop up, he can start reworking cars to non-computerized form… Multiply by a few million. Welcome to the U.S.A.
_Jim (11:46:04) :
“E.M.Smith (02:12:16) :
It it’s like the Bronco my neighbor had in about ‘73? it was carburetor / points. No electronics.”
No diodes in the alternator? What kind of “voltage regulator” controlled the alternator – mech or solid-state?
Aside from the fact that for an emergency “get home” run you can get about 3 to 4 hours without an alternator (I’ve done up to 6) and that’s putting you well toward the end of the likely fuel on board…
The power that an EMP generates is limited. It’s only sensitive gear that it fries (thus EMP ratings being possible for mil spec gear). In small objects like cars the effects of a CME are even less (as noted in posting above). Your diode bridge ought to survive just fine (power generated behind the bridge goes through it normally and gets soaked up by the battery and will not be the 50-100 Amps the diodes normally handle. Reverse voltage breakdown is also unlikely due to how hard it is to make 40+ V or so in a 3 foot wire in sufficient amperage through a steel skin; and any attempt to do that as reverse volts has to deal with this giant capacitor of a battery coupling the pulse to ground and sucking up 100+ amps as charging current… It’s the micro-amp sensitive computer chips, not the 100 amp diodes, that “have issues” in a car sized object.
It’s the engine control computer that dies, not the power diodes.
“E.M.Smith (02:12:16) : Basically, it wasn’t until about the mid-to-late ’80s that electronic stuff started hitting hard”
You listed some examples of early adopters. Yes, some makers went early into that dark side. The big hit came from ’80-’88 or so. In the context of the article, the important bit is that you can find ’80s cars that are all mechanical; not that somebody made a bit of sensitive gear in the ’70s.
BTW, my 1967 VW had a generator, not an alternator. VW seemed to be late to the ‘alternator’ party. I think they stuck with it through all the air cooled models.
Generally Chrysler and GM seemed to go electronic early while the Germans were last to let go of all mechanical.
Per alternator / regulators: There are lots of these in auto parts stores and being unconnected to wires ought to survive a CME / EMP fine even if somehow the one under the hood had a problem. Worst case would be that after the drive home on battery, you use the 12vdc tap on the standby generator to charge the battery every few days. (Well, real worst case would be making a new diode bridge from the parts box in my electronics kit; but that’s getting out there a “paranoia too far” since there is no way a CME is going to blow power electronics inside a steel shell inside a sheet metal body…) An alternator is an optional luxury in a Mad Max emergency and you could keep going for the likely week or three needed via outboard charging, manually switching the ‘regulator’ and / or transplanting batteries from the dead vehicles. If it takes longer than a month, it isn’t that hard to turn a DC starter motor into a generator… but realistically, by then the military will be setting priorities and the ‘crisis’ would be largely over.
Though your post reminded me: Piston airplanes typically use magnetos so that a complete electric system failure does not stop the engine. So do a lot of old tractors. There would be a large number of small private planes that would be just fine, thanks. Maybe a loss of nav or radio gear in an EMP, but still flyable VFR.
As I mentioned before, I lived for several months without an alternator on my old International truck. PITA, yes, end of civilization? Nope.
You don’t need to make that fact plain to me; I’m the one who has in the past (on other blogs) has cited reports that COTS semiconductors and even COTS equipment has turned out to be suprising robust when subjected to simulated EMP environments.
You may be uawares of the integral anti-ESD (electrostatic discharge) protection that is part of IC (Integrated Circuit) technology today. I’d be glad point you to a few applicable standards and test set-ups if you’d like on that subject.
Alternator-schmalternator … it wasn’t just a few months ago that I drove with no-charge condition from mine, and did so for a couple days charging the batt when I got home from work until replaced, so nada new.
As to EMP, I don’t expect *any* effects from an EMP on any of my vehicles (save for directly under); and may I now remind you that it was _you_ who started down the road of ‘susceptable’ systems (this validly includes alternators and their solid-state control regulator sub-systems never mind the stinking doides, which when bad, can LEAK causing batter discharge! It doesn’t take total catastrophic failure to cause a ‘fail’) so I will stop here since I’m not looking to get involved in a Brer Rabbit tar-baby-class debate, it’s that I just don’t think Echo Mike Smith did the treatment of car ignitions and other systems justice in his earlier treatment of same. I also had a problem with the dates that were previously cited.
Updated link for document cited above:
http://www.pjm-miso.com/services/training/downloads/ops101-weatheremer.pdf