/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9030943
>Haven't heard of this flare before. Do you maybe also know of any resilient designs that would allow power grids to withstand such flares when given prior warning?
There's been some talk about decentralizing the grid and hardening certain points, but no action as of yet. (And even then, they tend to be concentrating more on vulnerability to terrorism.)

One fundamental problem is we have to use these giant, and extremely toxic, fluorine compound transformers that grid stations require for distribution, and haven't found a better way to do it. They take about three months to build, and we don't have enough backups to replace more than a dozen or so at any given time. When they do go down, the area of the city affected tends to be dead for week or more, as they are also difficult to transport safely (being basically giant glass cases of gas that eats both flesh and concrete on contact). There are hundreds of these in every major city - and a good sized solar flare would cause all those attached to the grid to explode at once.

It's also, of course, rather nasty when they do explode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcYrvEQvqkM (skip to 1 minute)

And yeah, all those smaller ones on the power poles are going to explode too, as well as the capacitors - so everything's going to be on fire.

You don't get a warning. We're trying to find ways to predict them, but have yet to do so, and they travel at close to the speed of light. This means you have about 8 minutes between the time they spawn and when they hit you, and even if you had a monitoring satellite in close solar orbit, it wouldn't be able to warn anyone before it was too late.

That all assumes it's an X3-X6 - anything much bigger and exploding transformers are going to be the least of your problems.