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Posts Tagged ‘electricity’

White House report ignores life-or-death threat

August 17, 2013 1 comment

wnd.com

WASHINGTON – The White House, along with the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, say that some 679 widespread power outages over the past 10 years have been due to the effects of severe weather on the U.S. electrical grid system.

The White House report, titled the “Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages,” said the cost of outages take various forms such as lost output and wages, spoiled inventory, delayed production, inconvenience and damage to the electric grid.

But left unaddressed is the potential impact that an electromagnetic pulse event would have.

In a just-published 28-page report, the White House said that severe weather has been the leading cause of power outages in the United States between 2003 and 2012, costing the U.S. economy up to $33 billion.

The report pointed out that the resilience of the U.S. electric grid system is integral to Read more…

Categories: electricty Tags: , , , , , ,

Protecting Yourself from EMP

August 16, 2013 Comments off

standeyo.com

EMP. The letters spell burnt out computers and other electrical systems and perhaps even a return to the dark ages if it were to mark the beginning of a nuclear war. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Once you understand EMP, you can take a few simple precautions to protect yourself and equipment from it. In fact, you can enjoy much of the “high tech” life style you’ve come accustomed to even after the use of a nuclear device has been used by terrorists—or there is an all-out WWIII.

EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse), also sometimes known as “NEMP” (Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse), was kept secret from the public for a long time and was first discovered more or less by accident when US Military tests of nuclear weapons started knocking out phone banks and other equipment miles from ground zero.

EMP is no longer “top secret” but information about it is still a little sketchy and hard to come by. Adding to the problems is the fact that its effects are hard to predict; even electronics designers have to test their equipment in powerful EMP simulators before they can be sure it is really capable of with standing the effect.

EMP occurs with all nuclear explosions. With smaller explosions the effects are Read more…

Categories: Earth Tags: , , , , ,

EMP attack on power grid could take down DOD systems, experts warn

September 13, 2012 1 comment

gcn.com

Defense systems that depend on the commercial electric grid are vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse attacks and solar storms that could seriously damage the nation’s infrastructure, experts from the Homeland Security and Defense departments told a House Homeland Security subcommittee.

The likelihood and the effects of such an event have been the subject of debate, and legislation that would require defenses against them is stalled in the House.

Major military weapons systems and nuclear assets are hardened against EMP events, but “DOD is heavily dependent on the commercial electric grid,” Michael Aimone, director of DOD Business Enterprise Integration, told the subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who testified as a witness at the Sept. 12 hearing, said Russia and several other countries are developing an offensive EMP capability, but there is little protection against such attacks on the commercial grid. He called for installing hardware protection for the most critical elements.

”The major vulnerability we have right now is damage to our major transformers,” which could put parts of the Read more…

Categories: electricty, United States Tags: , , , ,

Severe space weather: How big a threat?

March 14, 2012 Comments off

computerworld.com

CSO – Last week a dark spot on the Sun, nearly the size of Jupiter, let go with a massive solar eruption. For a number of days thereafter, scientists around the world waited to see if the discharged solar plasma and charged particles would interfere with communication systems, satellites, computer circuits and even the electrical grid.

Fortunately, while northern parts of the globe witnessed a spectacular light show, communications systems and utilities went unscathed.

Unfortunately, we may not always be so lucky. According to a study published last month by Space Weather: The International Journal of Research and Applications there is about a 12 percent chance that within the next decade such a solar storm hitting Earth could be powerful enough to significantly disrupt satellites and the power grid.

So how prepared is the U.S. to take such an electromagnetic hit to its electric power distribution networks? To put it subtly: not so much.

Experts say it could take Read more…

Categories: electricty, United States Tags: , , ,

Solar flare could unleash nuclear holocaust across planet Earth, forcing hundreds of nuclear power plants into total meltdowns

September 13, 2011 Comments off

naturalnews

power (NaturalNews) Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it’s right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it’s that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst Read more…

Categories: nuclear crisis, solar flare Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Power-grid experiment could confuse electric clocks

June 25, 2011 Comments off

msnbc

Traffic lights, security systems and computers may be affected by frequency change as well
Chris Carthart

Charles Krupa  /  AP

A UPS delivery man in South Boston wheels packages past a store window featuring clocks at Quincy Market in Boston.

WASHINGTON — A yearlong experiment with America’s electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers — and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast.

“A lot of people are going to have things break and they’re not going to know why,” said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping agencies in the federal government.

Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run a little fast or slow. Power companies now take steps to correct it and keep the frequency of the current — and the time — as precise as possible.

The group that oversees the U.S. power grid is proposing an experiment that would allow more frequency variation than it does now without Read more…

Categories: power grid Tags: , ,

Solar Threat: We’ll Have Minutes to Respond; Government Plans Controlled Blackouts; Elite Contingency Plans

June 15, 2011 Comments off

shtfplan

While many will claim that solar storms are an unrealistic threat to our world, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom aren’t taking any chances.

According to a report put together by Alex Thomas of The Intel Hub, the threat is not only real, but very likely, and could change the world as we know it from one day to the next:

In a stunning announcement, The United States and United Kingdom are likely set to began “controlled” power cuts in preparation of a giant solar storm.

The announcement by Thomas Bogdan, the director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, comes a week after a large scale solar flare released a massive amount of radiation and threatened to cause moderate disruption.

The solar flare on June 7th, 2011 was luckily pointed away from Earth but caused Read more…

Categories: Coming Events, Solar Storm Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wallow Fire Threatening Power Supplies to New Mexico and Texas

June 9, 2011 Comments off

christianpost

Firefighters have battled through the night in an attempt to protect numerous Arizona mountain communities from the spreading Wallow fire that has forced thousands to evacuate and flee their homes.

(Photo: Reuters/Joshua Lott)Arizona Department of Trasportation workers prepare to close off a section of U.S. Highway 60 due to the Wallow Wildfire in Springerville, Arizona June 8, 2011. A wildfire believed sparked by inattentive campers blazed unchecked for an 11th day in eastern Arizona on Wednesday, leaving at least 600 square miles of pine forest blackened and menacing several mountain towns near the New Mexico border.

The fire has now become the second largest ever seen in Arizona, and is threatening electricity supplies as far away as Texas.

The fire, which during Wednesday night was being reported as covering 607-square miles, is expected to reach power lines by early Friday. It is feared that if lines are damaged, hundreds of thousands in New Mexico and Texas would face rolling blackouts.

For the early part of this week driving winds have Read more…

Categories: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas Tags: , , , , ,

U.S. Will Build Five New Nuclear Reactors by 2020, New Energy Finance Says

April 4, 2011 Comments off

bloomberg

 

The U.S. will build five new nuclear reactors by 2020 and ignore calls to scale back plans in the wake of Japan’s nuclear accident, said Chris Gadomski, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“We’ll see a reassessment and reevaluation and then stay the course,” Gadomski said today at a conference in New York today. Plans to build the five reactors are already underway, he said, and “We don’t see that changing.”

No new nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. since the 1979 near-meltdown at Three Mile Island. Interest in atomic energy has gained as a way to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, and the Obama administration has offered loan guarantees to developers of reactors, which account for a fifth of total U.S. electricity.

“We are looking first and foremost at keeping our current fleet operating safely,” said Andrea Sterdis, senior manager of nuclear expansion at Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal power supplier that operates four reactors in the U.S. South. She spoke at the conference hosted by New Energy Finance.

The biggest threat to new nuclear power plants may be the low cost of natural gas, which can be used to fuel power stations that are quicker and cheaper to build than atomic- fueled facilities, said said Edward Kee, vice president of NERA Economic Consulting.

“Everything in the U.S. is challenged by cheap natural gas,” Kee said at the conference.

Categories: nuclear technology Tags: , , , ,

Critical U.S. Infrastructure at Risk of Cyber Attack, Experts Warn

March 24, 2011 Comments off

foxnews.com

Oct. 26: The reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran.

AP

Oct. 26: The reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran.

Just as the computers that ran Iran’s nuclear program were sabotaged and crippled by a cyber “super worm” virus, the software used to run much of America’s industrial, transportation and power infrastructure — including nuclear power plants and major airports — is vulnerable to cyber attack, and two software companies have revealed dozens of successful hacks to prove it.

The issue lies in specialized software systems sold by Siemens, Iconics, 7-Technologies and others to power plants and other infrastructure. Called “supervisory control and data acquisition” systems, or SCADA, they run software solely for industrial use.

And it’s just as vulnerable as every other program on your Read more…

Categories: internet, Technology, United States Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,