solar storms to turn every nuke plant into a fukushima?

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the reason this article was written is because fearful people are easy to control

Power plant control rooms are relatively well shielded compared to most buildings and many of them have 30 year old or older electronics with fewer sensitive parts than more modern integrated circuits are designed with. Also, most if not all American reactors can be shutdown by crews of people turning a massive wrench to shut the reactor down cold. The Fukushima reactors did not have such a feature. The power grid can probably get repaired fairly fast, utilities and sanitation can probably be restored shortly after that, but a lot of electronics made in the last decade (maybe longer) and newer cars might not fare so well. Cars may need considerable work to replace enough electronics to get it running again (expect long backorders on the parts, as well as stolen and cleaned up defective ones getting dumped on the market), and a lot of computer equipment would need to be replaced. The society that got hit might resemble that show "Falling Skies" for a while. How long would depend on their economy and the competency (and integrity) of their government at all levels. Most communities will fare okay, others like Los Angeles for example will probably seem like there really is an alien invasion going on.

Satellites would take heavy losses, so large holes in the phone system, internet, GPS, financial transactions, and weather forecasting would be likely. Hopefully you are not so helplessly technology dependent that you cannot live without these things temporarily.

The good news is that the odds of getting hit with such a storm at all are low. There are 129600 square degrees that solar flares could be ejected at. Yeah they spread out but earth is still a very small target. Additionally, there are a lot of places the earth can get hit that would do relatively little harm. It could hit over a major ocean, over the polar regions, over western and central Africa, as well as the Sahara, the middle east, central Asia, and Siberia.

The best thing you can do is store up a week's worth of food and water, first aid supplies, batteries, camping and bad weather gear ( you may need a camping toilet and cooking equipment), propane, weapons you can stay proficient with (and preferably 500 rounds of ammo if you are using most types of firearms), an emergency supply of prescription meds (or at least enough to safely titrate down with a plan from your doctor), and spare goods to trade. In jurisdictions where this is legal, consider keeping a couple simple and cheap weapons on hand to trade or pass out to help protect the area around your home.

1. Breeder reactors minimize the problem of nuclear residue.
2. We don't need mountains of "hot" waste. We can borate it and drop the slugs down the Mariana Trench which is 6.5 miles deep in the Pacific Ocean. That is plenty of protection. Eventually all the slugs will be subducted at the edge of tectonic plate. From the depths came radioactive elements and to the depths they shall return.

ruveyn

Older cars and trucks won't be affected.


Contrary to what hollywood likes to show, many electronics would not be permanently wrecked from a solar flare, simply because the electronics are on the ground. While there are certain areas that would be affected, the closer you get to the equator, the less effect those flares will have. Some electronics will have to be replaced, some won't. Seriously, our biggest worry should be about our satellites, not things on the ground, which are well within Earth's Magnetic Field.

no but the electronics regulating the power flow might very well be affected.

the people in japan wouldn't have.

Only active circuitry is affected by EMPs, such as is associated with solar flares. The diesel generators only come on after the loss of power. Storage batteries aren't affected. It's literally like an electrical pressure valve, current stops flowing here, relay flips and the diesels start, in those few seconds the major threat has already swept past the Earth. Hopefully the ISS would be behind the Earth relative to the Sun.

Now, go and buy those solar panels you've always wanted.

This is correct.

I was a reactor operator aboard a nuclear submarine for many years, and an instructor in the Navy's Nuclear Power training command. There are a number of redundant systems designed to maintain coolant flow over the core, the last in line being a natural convection-flow system that does not require electrical power. There is also, if needed, a one-time injection of coolant made possible by high pressure air literally blowing water into the core.

How did we know these systems worked? We used them routinely during reactor shutdown periods for maintenance or whatnot. They work very well. In fact, we had to be very careful with the convection-flow system that it didn't cool the reactor too fast and over-stress metal parts.

As to why the Japanese plants didn't have this capability, I don't know. Nor do I know the extent that US commercial power plants use this design. But I do know this ... if the Japanese plants had been designed and operated the way we did them in the Navy, the loss of their emergency diesels would not have resulted in partial meltdowns.

It's still possible, presumably, that the tsunami (or an earthquake) could have caused enough structural damage to the plant to disable even the convection-flow system, had there been one. In that case, all bets are off. Japan was seriously lucky this disaster wasn't worse than it was.

Additionally, most crude electrical equipment can be brought back online with a new battery because nothing else in the device contains circuitry that can be damaged by EMPs.

Nahh. I don't think they're intentionally trying to scare anyone. It's the Watergate Effect ... they all want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, so they juice it up to make it as spectacular as they can. Besides that, they are only minimally knowledgeable about this stuff ... they just know enough to be dangerous ... and consequently they often get the emphasis wrong, even if their facts, strictly speaking, are correct.

Interesting take on it, although I would hope that if we'd looked into the future 50 or 75 or 100 years ago, we'd have chosen solar.

We actually had a good shot at it back in the 1970's, after the first Arab oil embargo. There was a sense of urgency about freeing ourselves from our petroleum addiction, and the government was pushing all sorts of programs for alternative energy. We were making a hell of a progress, too. In just a few years, cars were routinely getting 50+ mpg and solar/wind/etc power systems were becoming more viable all the time.

And then, of course, the Reagan Administration came along and shut it all down. Today, we're back to gas-guzzling behemoths, despite pump prices triple what they were then, and large-scale interest in solar is only half-hearted at best.

A pity.

Solar photovoltaic generation of electricity has it uses, mostly in niches where sunlight is plentiful. It is not sufficient to power a major industrial economy. Nuclear power is the only way to go without the pollution side effects.

ruveyn

No-one has been or will be badly harmed, health-wise, from radiation due to the Fukushima incident. Couple of people at the plant got minor burns from traipsing through contaminated water. Millions have been and will continue to be harmed by the moronic overreaction to it.

Or lemme put it another way - I live near a nuclear power station. If, by some freak of nature, it was overwhelmed by a tsunami and the same situation as at Fukushima played out - I wouldn't give a s**t. I'd be happy not to alter my daily routine in the slightest and I wouldn't be worried in the slightest about radiation. In the same way that you don't worry about radiation when you get on a plane, because that's the sort of teeny-tiny pathetic level of risk involved. But some stupid ignorant bastard who knows nothing about nuclear safety and everything about playing to the mob would undoubtedly kick everyone living near the plant out of their homes and jobs indefinitely. That's extremely annoying for me to see happening elsewhere, because it's so friggin' unnecessary and wasteful and stupid.

I will also point out that it would take a solar flare that would essentially kill all of us from hard radiation, before the electronics regulating the power flow would be affected, because those electronics are heavily shielded, from hard radiation and emp.

um, yet perhaps. there are areas in that plant where only a few seconds will kill you.

then there's the cancer deaths to come.

The Fukushima area got pretty well cooked over time and the rest of Japan got exposed to radioactive fallout lone enough to absorb highly abnormal amounts of it into their system. The workers are good as dead because they were given chemical suits to protect against the fallout, but they do nothing against beta and gamma radiation. This happened because the Japanese got overconfident in their use of electronics to run their emergency systems.