Broken/Special:Badtitle/NS100:JamesMoore/The UK Government Respond Regarding Solar Flare Threat
<summary>After reading Contact Report 516, on the 27th May, 2011, I e-mailed several organisations within the UK and also the European Energy Commission. One of these organisations was the UK's Department for Energy and Climate Change. The content of that e-mail was as follows:</summary>
Dear Sir/Madam,
Please can you state whether the predicted major solar flares, that Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox had spoken of on the 20th September, could disrupt power to the cooling systems of Britain's 19 or so nuclear reactors?
Furthermore what action has been taken or is planned to be taken in order to prevent such disruptions and therefore prevent multiple nuclear meltdowns?
This also applies to the other secret military, research and other nuclear reactors.
Yours faithfully,
James Moore
Today, on the 10th June 2011, I received a response from the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change. Click the following link to read it:
How should I respond, if at all?
In my opinion it is reassuring to receive a reply. That is decent of them. Furthermore it is even more reassuring to read that their work is still ongoing with regards to their investigations into the level of the threat:
Until recently, it was believed that this incident in 1989 represented the most severe consequences of “space weather” that we were likely to experience in the UK.
However, recent work in the USA has suggested that more intense episodes are possible, albeit on an infrequent basis.
My officials have met with experts from both America and the UK, together with the National Grid to quantify this risk and decide on the appropriate response to it.
This work is ongoing.
For your reference, Contact Report 516 contained the following key paragraph:
Billy: ...And thus all those mentioned do not know, that, for example, when the Sun suddenly goes crazy and hurls monstrous radiations to Earth, all electrical apparatuses, devices, generators, pumps and machines, and so forth, suddenly break down and the cooling of the atomic reactors can be paralysed. And if something like that happens then a worldwide nuclear catastrophe comes about, when the atomic reactors blow up. One can certainly assume that, with the atomic power plants, the reactors’ cooling systems have their own energy supply, yet these can also break down as a result of the Sun’s monstrous radiation, as you once said.
And furthermore, from a historical perspective, the Wikipedia article on the 1859 Solar Storm incident says the following:
On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
If telegraph systems were overloaded and inoperable for 2 continuous days in 1859, what does that mean for the effects of a possibly even longer and stronger solar storm on every single electrical and electronic device in today's heavily electricity dependent civilisation? What would be the consequences of cars, computers, ships, supermarket doors and checkouts, telephones, the entire Internet and backup electricity generators becoming inoperable?
The Fukushima disaster that occurred in March of this year consisted of 3 reactor core meltdowns due to insufficient cooling because power to the cooling systems was destroyed by the tsunami flood. Reactor number 1 went into meltdown after just 16 hours of the tsunami hitting. The other two followed within the next 2 or 3 days. This provides an historical perspective on how long it takes for nuclear reactor cores to meltdown after the cooling systems have been disrupted or destroyed. In the case of a solar flare destroying nuclear reactor cooling systems, we would therefore not have long to repair or jury rig replacements.
The 1859 solar storm lasted 2 days/48 hours, the nuclear meltdown occurred after just 16 hours....oh dear what should we do?
