The Grid Might Survive an Electromagnetic Pulse Just Fine

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The Grid Might Survive an Electromagnetic Pulse Just Fine
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Over the past few years, speculation has risen around whether North Korea or any other nation could detonate a nuclear weapon over the United States that would create an electromagnetic pulse and knock out all electricity for weeks or months.
But a sober new engineering study by industry experts finds that key equipment on the grid can be protected from any such EMP.
The study, by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-funded research organization, finds that existing technology can protect various components of the electric grid to buffer it from the effects of solar flares, lightning strikes, and an EMP from a nuclear blast all at the same time: a three-for-one surge protector.
“We have a strong technical basis for what the impacts [of an EMP] might be,” says Randy Horton, EPRI project manager and author of the report being released today.
Horton says that EPRI technicians worked with experts at the Department of Energy labs at Los Alamos and Sandia to simulate some effects of an EMP on substations and distribution systems.
They also did real-world testing of electrical equipment at an EPRI laboratory in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The study, which took three years to complete, looks at the effects of three kinds of energy spawned by a nuclear detonation.
The second wave, called an E2, lasts up to a second and can fry electric systems the way a lightning strike does, unless they are properly grounded.
Effects of an E2 wave on the grid are expected to be minimal.
Horton says simulations and testing by EPRI contradicts earlier findings that an EMP would wipe out the US grid.
“You could have a regional voltage collapse, but you wouldn’t damage a large number of bulk power transformers immediately,” Horton says.
Some members of an EMP commission have argued for the past decade that an attack would destroy the electric grid, and kill 90 percent of the US population through disease or starvation

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