The Threat Is Real: Billion Dollar NASA Mission To Study Blackout Risks to Power Grid

The potential for a devastating EMP resulting from a massive solar event, or a man made weapon, is well known and, increasingly, being taken seriously as a looming, perhaps inevitable, disaster. Surprisingly, there are actually voices in Congress urging Washington to prepare for all contingencies and to upgrade the power grid and infrastructure to better deal with an event that could easily disable the entire system – perhaps even for an extended period of time. At its worst, an EMP could result in the deaths of 90% of the population, whose lives – utterly dependent on handouts from the system and services from the fragile infrastructure – would be unsustainable without the electric grid. One half of that equation deals with the potential for solar flares, or coronal mass ejections, and other extreme space weather events to cause interruptions in Earth’s magnetosphere, in turn creating electrical discharges that have the potential to disrupt satellites orbiting the planet, and trigger outages in the electrical grid and most of the electronic devices on earth’s surface.



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