Tag Archives: risk assessment

The Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Four: “You Have Nothing to Worry About (click) Worry About (click) Worry About (click)…”

Stability Model of an experimental distribution grid

A stability map of a simple power grid. Each point on this image represents an operating state of a simple power grid consisting of a few generators. Bluish regions constitute stable working states, red unstable and ‘salt-and-pepper’ represent chaotic behavior. One can tune a grid for stability by controlling the phasing of generators and transformers on the grid and such settings suffice for day-to-day operations. It is difficult to decide where, or by how much, abnormalities such as geomagnetic storms might push a system into red, unstable regions, or, worse, salt-and-pepper regions where the system oscillates between states. It is easy to find cases on the map where chaotic regions lie very close to stable regions, indicating that the destabilizing push need not be large at all. James Thorp, Cornell University, published in IEEE Spectrum

People paid to worry about the North American power grid regard geomagnetic storms as “high impact, low-frequency” events, spawning the inevitable acronym: HILF. Low frequency, in that a geomagnetic storm as intense as May 1921, at 5,000 nano-Teslas/minute, or the 1859 Carrington Event, best guess: 7,500 nano-Teslas/minute, might not happen in our lifetimes, the lifetimes of our children, or even our grand children. If signature traces in Arctic ice core samples are correct, these are ‘500 year events.’ When it comes to deciding where to put that preventative maintenance dollar, storm-proofing Oklahoma elementary schools against EF 5 tornadoes seems a far more practical spend than the hardening of electrical grids against a half-theoretical event that might not even happen in 500 years.

What pulls planners up short is the high impact part: the utter god-awfulness of a power grid that crashes and which then can’t boot itself up. There is a self-referential dependency: fixing a dysfunctional power grid requires it to be functional, as key aspects of the manufacturing of transformers need electricity.

Nor can one expect the cavalry to ride in anytime soon, as the vast geographic reach of geomagnetic storms means that one strong enough to take down the North American grid may very likely take down Eurasian grids as well – entire hemispheres could wind up in the toilet, and we only have two hemispheres. That and the statistical variableness to it all: the Carrington 1859 and May 1921 storms, nominally two ‘500 year events’ were, in fact, separated by only sixty-two years.

Where does the buck stop? Continue reading →

Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Three: When a CME Hits the Atmosphere

Failed GSU transformer at Salem River, NJ

A Generator Step Up (GSU) transformer failed at the Salem River Nuclear Plant during the March 1989 geomagnetic storm. The unit is depicted on the left; some of the burned 22kV primary windings are shown on the right. Though immersed in cooling oil, the windings became hot enough to melt copper, at about 2000 degrees F. John Kappenman, Metatech

Coronal Mass Ejections are mainly charged particles, protons and electrons. When a CME arrives at Earth, the charged protons and electrons come under the influence of the Earth’s own magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Charged particles spin around the lines of magnetic force that comprise the magnetosphere, which diverts most of CME harmlessly around the planet, keeping Earth’s surface tranquil.

If the ejection is large enough, however, it can distort the shape of the magnetosphere, occasionally causing magnetic flux lines to snap and reconnect. When this happens, charged particles leak in and follow the magnetosphere’s flux lines down to the Earth’s ionosphere. There, they strike oxygen and nitrogen molecules and strip them of electrons. These ionized gases glow, giving rise to the ethereal beauty of the auroras around the north and south poles. Unfortunately, these excess charged particles also produce immense electrojets.

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Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Two: The Physics of Geomagnetic Storms

goddard_cme_earth

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. The image above includes an image of Earth to show the size of the CME compared to the size of Earth. NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013, a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurled nearly one billion tons of charged particles from the sun’s corona at an outward velocity of one million miles per hour – 270 miles per second.

In less than a half hour, 2,700 virtual Empire State Buildings, 340,000 tons apiece – give or take a few gorillas – erupted from an active region of the Sun’s surface called AR1748, a northern latitude sunspot. AR1748 had just become visible on the western limb of the Sun’s surface when it ejected this mass, so the vast bulk of it hurled outward, not toward us in Libra, but more or less toward Cancer, at right-angles to us. In practical terms, it shot wide of its mark. Still an impressive shot. The CME had been triggered by an M class solar flare, the second largest in a five step scheme (An, Bn, Cn, Mn, Xn; for n a relative magnitude). It had been the largest coronal mass ejection observed thus far in 2013.

And it was still early in the day for AR1748.

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Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part One: The Day We Lost Quebec

Electrojets over N. America

John Kappenman reconstructed the electrojets which formed in the ionosphere late in the March 13, 1989 geomagnetic storm which compromised the Hydro-Quebec power grid in Canada. Concurrently, the eastward jet induced ground currents that severely strained the electrical distribution grid of northern continental United States, resulting in a transformer failure at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant, in New Jersey. Courtesy of Metatech

Nearly a quarter century ago, on March 13, 1989,  a geomagnetic storm led to the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid system, which furnishes power to much of the province of Quebec, Canada. So pervasive were abnormal currents, that protective circuit breakers tripped throughout the system, bringing the entire grid to a halt in about one and a half minutes. The grid’s self-protective systems were geared toward local abnormalities happening in particular places. In contrast, ground induced currents created abnormalities everywhere. The good news was that most of the hardware protected itself. The bad news was that six million customers were without power for as long as nine hours, and where transformer damage did occur, outages continued for another week.

Further south, the United States experienced a close shave. A second surge in the March 13 storm generated similar ground induced currents in the northern United States, with large current spikes observed from the Pacific Northwest to the mid-Atlantic states, one spike destroying a large GSU transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in New Jersey. According to John Kappenman, of the Metatech Corporation “It was probably at this time that we came uncomfortably close to triggering a blackout that could have literally extended clear across the country.”

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The Approach of Danger

 

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? No! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with the treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is this approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It can not come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was likely right for the most part, as he was on most matters. What he doesn’t seem to have foreseen – and how could he have – was that we’d foul our own environment sufficiently to poison entire communities, laying waste to our fellow citizens in ways that Lincoln knew was beyond the reach of outside armies.

Faisalabad car bomb blast causes explosion in a compressed natural gas station

Via Wikipedia Entry 2011 Faisalabad Bombing:

The 2011 Faisalabad bombing occurred on 8 March 2011.  ((Masood, Salman (8 March 2011). “Car Bomb Kills at Least 24 Near Spy Agency in Pakistan”. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/world/asia/09pakistan-blast.html. Retrieved 8 March 2011)).  At least 25 people were killed and over 127 wounded when a car bomb blast occurred in a compressed natural gas station in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. ((Blast in Faisalabad CNG station, 25 dead”. The Express Tribune. 8 March 2011. http://tribune.com.pk/story/129384/blast-in-faisalabad-injures-12/. Retrieved 8 March 2011.))  The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the explosion. ((Ahmed, Munir (8 March 2011). “Taliban car bombing kills 20 in east Pakistan”. Associated Press. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110308/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_19. Retrieved 8 March 2011.))

This underscores the target value of energy storage to terrorist attacks, which has two aspects:

  1. The increased blast yield – the explosive energy – charge shaping aside – is the sum of the energy of the car bomb and the stored natural gas. This is another example of the problems inherent in centralizing energy storage.
  2. Infrastructure disruption. Again, the more centralized the energy storage, the greater the disruption. This principle, of course, applies not only to energy distribution networks, but to water supplies, sewage systems, and communications networks.

Iran and Britain expel diplomats after Iranian presidential election – Wikinews, the free news source

Via WikiNews:Iran and Britain expel diplomats after Iranian presidential election.

We note that while attacks from President Obama’s political right have urged him to be more aggressive, in the UK David Cameron has reminded the P.M. that the “Iranian elections [are] an internal Iranian conflict, between Iranians and other Iranians.” If this ends with a full end of diplomatic relations, what impact will this have for formal and informal communications and intelligence-gathering between Iran and the west? Not good, we suspect.

The expulsions come in the wake of the recent Iranian presidential election, and hostility directed by Iran to the United Kingdom by Iranian leaders and official news services, including statements made by Supreme Leader of IranAli Khamenei

calling the British government the “most evil” of foreign governments.

Commenting upon the expulsion as it was announced, Leader of the Opposition in the British House of Commons, David Cameron , urged people to remember that this was not a conflict between Iran and the United Kingdom, but was an internal Iranian conflict, between Iranians and other Iranians.

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MIT Professors, Grad students, develop nanotube detector for airborne toxins

From Nano TechWire, this excerpt from Super-sensitive and small: New MIT detector uses nanotubes to sense deadly gases
 

Using carbon nanotubes, MIT chemical engineers have built the most sensitive electronic detector yet for sensing deadly gases such as the nerve agent sarin.

The technology, which could also detect mustard gas, ammonia and VX nerve agents, has potential to be used as a low-cost, low-energy device that could be carried in a pocket or deployed inside a building to monitor hazardous chemicals.

“We think this could be applied to a variety of environmental and security applications,” said Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and senior author of a paper describing the work published this week in the online edition of Angewandte Chemie.

Read the rest at NanoTechWire.