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[Graknorke]

And it has to be dialectric so as to not have a current induced from the magnetic fields, right? Because that would interfere with the transformer's function.

Okay that makes sense. Thanks.

[wierd]

No, the induction of electrical current from a rapidly oscillating magnetic field is HOW they work.

It needs to be dielectric to prevent corona discharges. (charge potential builds up around the coil windings, producing plasma) The dielectric properties of the fluid make charge buildup much more difficult than in open air.  The high voltage bulk transfer lines can produce corona phenomena just on the wire bundles themselves.

Looks like this in open air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojxQHJx5T2w

Again, this would be high voltage corona discharges in the event of an other CME of that magnitude.

[Graknorke]

The induction of a current in the secondary coil is how transformers work, but I think we might be talking across each other. The thing dialectrics do is not have current flow through them (at least, not in the same way as you get in an electrolyte) and therefore not ionising like most fluids would. And that's what prevent corona discharge in the fluid.

[wierd]

Exactly. The magnetic field lines pass through the fluid just fine. The electrical charges do not. One set of current movements induces another set of current movements, based on the the law of induction.
You would need a (super)paramagnetic material to isolate magnetic flux lines.

The issue with the CME is that the dielectric breaks down under the charge forces applied, it then becomes slightly conductive and or forms gas bubbles which are more conductive than the fluid is, charges leap around inside, temperature rises-- ignition happens, then plasma formation, then catastrophic failure. "Turning off the power" wont eliminate the induction happening on the power lines from the currents in the ionosphere. It will continue to burn out of control.

[SirQuiamus]

Internet conspiracy theories are great fun, to be sure: An endless pageant of highly entertaining clowns and village idiots for your enjoyment, entirely free of charge, with only a handful of stray homicidal maniacs thrown into the mix.

I love browsing ATS and other nutty sites as much as the next guy, but that slimy underbelly of hate and violence really gets to me sometimes.

EDIT:

Frankfurt school begins, 1923: Rather disappointed that the majority of the world had not undergone a marxist revolution, marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above. Adapting this, later thinkers of the Frankfurt School decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values. They fled Europe during the rise of Nazism and eventually established themselves in America through New York, gaining a favourable reception amongst American and English academia. Their influence can be felt way into the modern age, where anyone studying a liberal arts course will find marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism as being the three standard 'alternative viewpoints,' modern progressive media rings and anything crazy anyone from tumblr says.

How is that supposed to be a legit conspiracy, as opposed to a shoddy wingnut bogeyman? If 20th-century Marxist criticism had any effect on anything whatsoever, it was limited to an ever-so-slight decrease in the quality of scholarship in liberal arts faculties, as this guy points out:
 

In my grad programme, the three words every paper needed to get an A are hegemony, discourse, and power.

I can certainly testify to the awesome power that "Marxist" codewords have on essay grading, but apart from that, it's just inconsequential academic hogwash for addled folk like meself.

[IronyOwl]

It would destroy the power transformers. Transformers are filled with a special chemical dialectric that is difficult to synthesize. The time it would take to replace all the needed transformers to restore power would be over 50 years.

and the logistical difficulties of manufacturing additional replacement units while this is all going on.  At CURRENT levels of manufacture, it would take about 50 years to manufacture (I think that's right...) enough to rebuild the US's power grid. (let alone the world's!)

I'm curious about this. Does this assume a panicked rush to get everything back online, or does it just mean that the US manufactures 2% of its current power transformers annually? What would the bottleneck be and why?

[andrea]

I imagine a bottleneck would be trying to get factories up and running AND increasing production during world wide infrastructural collapse and without a working energy grid.
It sounds like most things carrying their own power sources would not be as heavily affected, so it wouldn't be a total collapse.

[The Master]

So basically, as long as I had a lead box with a generator in it, I'd be fine?

[Karnewarrior]

It looks like the south might really rise again; more survival nuts and rednecks with generators there.

Cathar Jesus save us all.

[Bohandas]

Happy X-Day

[Bohandas]

Could insect screens (like in windows and doors) be used to make faraday shielding? Those screens are sometimes made of metal, right?

What about looping copper wire around my laptop case and/or my bag of flash drives? How close would the loops have to be to keep my data from getting fried in the event of an NEMP or coronal mass ejection

[Arx]

If it's a conductive metal, it should be possible.

The easiest way to do it is, in fact, a tinfoil hat; since tinfoil's a single contiguous conductor, it makes a very good cage. Looping copper around it... might work, but I wouldn't put money on it. You'd have to have a lot of loops of wire (the only gaps must be smaller than the wavelength of the frequency of radiation you want shielded out).

You could also just buy anti-static pouches to keep your flash drives in. They do pretty much exactly the same thing.

Supplementary reading.

[i2amroy]

Not to burst any bubbles, but the vast majority of large transformers (many regions have different rules for smaller, indoor transformers due to fire regulations) just use a basic mineral or silicone-based oil for their dielectric material. While it certainly takes a fair bit of processing to get stuff that is pure enough to be used, it's still pretty much just the same basic distilling and fractionation processes that we use to separate crude oil out into it's various specific oils. And while there certainly are much more complex materials out there that we are starting to use (since they offer greater fire/spil resistance, less wear over time, etc.), there's nothing saying that we couldn't just switch back to pure mineral oil-based transformer oils if needed.

I highly doubt that it would take us 50 years to rebuild the amount of transformers we need, and that's not even considering that with current measures states are already implementing and the measures already in place it's very unlikely that the entire grid as a whole would go down in that permanent of a fashion (though it might take quite a beating).

[wierd]

Small transformer, yes.  Not the big trunk line ones though.  Mineral oil simply isnt up to that challenge.

For an idea on how quickly this kind of thing can happen, I direct you to the smaller quebec province event of 1989. The power grid went from "normal operations" to "total failure" in 90 seconds.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html

The issue is actually a rather serious one, and has quite a few experts genuinely worried.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0509/How-a-solar-flare-could-send-us-back-to-the-Stone-Age


You can probably rest more or less easy though. Recent improvements in modelling of stellar magnetic dynamics has suggested that there will be a marked reduction in solar magnetic events, (waaaay lower) for quite a while in the coming future.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709092955.htm

[Karnewarrior]

What if we... nuke the sun???

Then, it'll be in tiny pieces, so it won't be as bright, and because of stellar mechanics, We'd have daytime all the time, so we can farm more food!this was the "im joking" font, right?