Our Electrical Achilles Heel
Today the FBI and the U.S. Marshall’s office got hacked and had to shut down for a few hours. But what if the FBI had to shut down for a couple of day? What would crime be like in America then? More importantly, what if our satellites we disabled and we could not SEE the rest of the world as we do now? And how could we defend ourselves with rockets that had no targets to go to because their GPS was inoperable?
America is totally dependent upon ELECTRICITY1
Houston had enough experience last fall with hurricane Ike to know how critical electricity is to the survival of a city and nation. The fourth largest city in America stopped operating for a few weeks! Thus, electricity, the electrical grid, and all the components that delivery electricity to an energy starved society is the achilles heel. Without electricity SOCIETY, in America, shuts down.
What if we had a serious interstellar pulse hit us or what if the sun spits out a massive coronal ejection?
There would be no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.
Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, there is no more modern healthcare. The truly shocking fact is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. Within a month the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.
Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month. Nuclear power stations wouldn’t fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.
Hurricane Katrina’s societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.
Is there any good news in all of this? The fact that the rest of the world would be in the same mess that we are helps neutralize the military aspects, at least as far as we know. There may be more hidden achilles heels than w know.
As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it. Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/environment-articles/our-electrical-achilles-heel-930406.html