Near Term Human Extinction

[dnem]

Yes, I was referring to the need to cool spent fuel rods which rely on auxiliary generators run mostly on diesel fuel.  I believe this is the bigger risk in the wake of a Carrington scale event than the reactor cores themselves.

[vox_mundi]

Those type of events will also melt all transformers so that would leave millions without electricity and with fried computers and phones.

Rebuilding from that will take a long time. Meanwhile the food in the fridge rots, at home and all the shops and warehouses.

PS: The carrington event took 17 hours to get here but usually it takes longer so there is time to shut down things.

Most of the energy directly released by a solar flare is in the form of electromagnetic radiation. ... Since the particles all travel at the speed of light -- 300,000 kilometers per second -- the solar flare energy takes 500 seconds to arrive at Earth -- a little more than eight minutes after it leaves the sun.

A solar flare's burst of electromagnetic radiation also sends particles flying. A coronal mass ejection, or CME, is the name given to a big surge of particles emitted from the surface of the sun, and it  sometimes accompanies a solar flare.

The speed of the particles depends on the strength and rapidity of the flare that sends them flying. The highest energy particles from a flare can arrive in as little as two minutes after the electromagnetic radiation, while CMEs take up to three or four days to arrive at Earth.

Effects is regional, not global. Risk is determined by factors such as magnetic latitude, distance to the coast and ground conductivity.

https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-risk-insight/risk-reports/library/natural-environment/solar-storm

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Papers/LP_0002_DeMaio_Electromagnetic_Defense_Task_Force.pdf

https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2016/07/05/update-keeping-u-s-reactors-safe-from-power-pulses/

The Nuclear Regulatory Agency concluded as recently as three years ago that nuclear power plants can safely shut down following an EMP event.  NRC drafted a rule last year on maintaining key plant safety functions after a severe event, particularly on how to keep spent fuel pools cool.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/epri-threat-of-emp-attacks-on-us-transmission-has-been-overstated/553795/

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) found the potential impacts of EMPs on transmission substations do not include long-lasting blackouts, national grid failure and mass casualties, as previously reported. Instead they would lead to regional service interruptions.

It would be good at this point to understand some of the technical steps to an EMP. The first pulse occurs when gamma rays emanating from the burst interact with the Earth’s atmosphere and eject electrons that stream down the Earth’s magnetic field to generate an incredibly fast electromagnetic pulse within about a billionth of a second after the burst. That pulse peaks around 50,000 V/m on the Earth’s surface.

This first pulse is of the most concern because of its high amplitude and wide bandwidth, allowing it to inject significant energy into conductors as short as twelve inches. Fortunately, this pulse only lasts a millionth of a second, but still time to wreak havoc.

Another pulse occurs just after this, resulting from a second set of gammas produced by energetic neutrons. The peak fields are much lower, about 100 V/m and last less than a second.

The final pulse is a wave similar in nature to naturally-occurring geomagnetic storms associated with coronal mass ejections from the Sun’s surface. These are low frequency, low amplitude pulses that lasts from minutes to hours. Although this may appear to be less intense, these can cause direct damage to equipment connected to long electrical lines, and can damage transformers, uninterruptible power supplies and generators.

Fortunately, the same protection devices we have developed to withstand natural solar events will work with this third pulse. So new protection strategies need to focus on the first two short pulses.

Most nuclear plants are EMP-hardening their back-up generators.

Estimates for turning the power back range from hours to years, depending on region. Since the 2011 report, about 40% of the power plants have hardened their at-risk components. It's still a major problem but not an E.L.E.

It wouldn't be a cake-walk - 1-10 million dead, martial law, etc., lose a half-century of advancement- but life would go on

Affects would be inversely proportional to the degree of technological advancements.

[harpy]

Maybe it wasn't such an intelligent decision to become wholly reliant upon metal wires propped up by wooden posts for our day to day survival.

I read through Vox Mundi's references, most of them contain very little substance, the second one is the only one with detailed information.   http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

The rest basically just ramble on and on about the "threat".

If these references were meant to re-assure me that this situation is well planned for, I feel less assured now than I did before.

[kassy]

Most of the energy directly released by a solar flare is in the form of electromagnetic radiation. ... Since the particles all travel at the speed of light -- 300,000 kilometers per second -- the solar flare energy takes 500 seconds to arrive at Earth -- a little more than eight minutes after it leaves the sun.

The flare was associated with a major coronal mass ejection (CME) that travelled directly toward Earth, taking 17.6 hours to make the 150 million kilometer (93 million mile) journey. Typical CMEs take several days to arrive at Earth, but it is believed that the relatively high speed of this CME was made possible by a prior CME

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_1859_geomagnetic_storm

The particles are not light particles so they are a lot slower.

[harpy]

From what I read, the Carrington event took place over more than a day.

My faith in the world's governments to react in time to something like that is negligible.

17 hours would likely be enough time for the military organizations to make preparations, but how much faith do we have that there's plans for all 400+ nuclear reactors, and other power plants for that matter?

Fukishima had all their equipment at ground level, and that power plant was built in an area where tsunami's occur frequently.  All their disel generators got flooded, because they couldn't be bothered to make the necessary preparations for a rare event.

[vox_mundi]

Tree Rings Offer Insight Into Devastating Radiation Storms
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-tree-insight-devastating-storms.html

A University of Queensland team led by Dr. Benjamin Pope from UQ's School of Mathematics and Physics applied cutting edge statistics to data from millennia-old trees, to find out more about radiation "storms."

"These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years, but what causes them is unclear," Dr. Pope said

"The leading theory is that they are huge solar flares. We need to know more, because if one of these happened today, it would destroy technology including satellites, internet cables, long-distance power lines and transformers. The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable."

Enter the humble tree ring.

"Because you can count a tree's rings to identify its age, you can also observe historical cosmic events going back thousands of years," Mr. Zhang said. "When radiation strikes the atmosphere, it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters through the air, oceans, plants, and animals, and produces an annual record of radiation in tree rings. We modeled the global carbon cycle to reconstruct the process over a 10,000-year period, to gain insight into the scale and nature of the Miyake Events."

The common theory until now has been that Miyake Events are giant solar flares.

"But our results challenge this," Mr. Zhang said. "We've shown they're not correlated with sunspot activity, and some actually last one or two years. Rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what we may be looking at is a kind of astrophysical 'storm' or outburst."

Dr. Pope said the fact scientists don't know exactly what Miyake Events are, or how to predict their occurrence, is very disturbing.

"Based on available data, there's roughly a one percent chance of seeing another one within the next decade. But we don't know how to predict it or what harms it may cause. These odds are quite alarming, and lay the foundation for further research," he concluded.

The research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A

Modelling Cosmic Radiation Events in the Tree-ring Radiocarbon Record, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences (2022).
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2022.0497

[kassy]

"These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years

Does not really correlate well with human extinction events?

[oren]

To be sure, humans didn't rely much on electronics in the past...

[Rodius]

To be sure, humans didn't rely much on electronics in the past...

Nor will we in the future

[El Cid]

A huge radiation storm would most definitely devastate human society. Restoring the grid would take months if not years. In the meantime millions would be without drinking water and food. This would not result in human extinction though, although if I remember correctly the US military tried to model the results and said something like that in the worst case 5-10% of the US population could die

[trm1958]

A huge radiation storm would most definitely devastate human society. Restoring the grid would take months if not years. In the meantime millions would be without drinking water and food. This would not result in human extinction though, although if I remember correctly the US military tried to model the results and said something like that in the worst case 5-10% of the US population could die

The estimates I hear in EMP attack fiction and speculation is that 5-10% of the US population would survive.

[kassy]

As long as some live it is not extinction.

Detailed study of these events is important to determine their origin. Better data are available for the two events in the Common Era, showing that the events of 774 and 993 CE are globally coherent, including many trees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres [23]. Meanwhile, although the other events show sharp single-year rises, the event of 660 BCE has a prolonged rise over a couple of years, which could be due to a prolonged production or a succession of events [24]. For comparison, a decade-long rise in 5480 BCE, less than a century before the single-year rise in 5410 BCE, is ascribed by multiradionuclide evidence to an unusual grand solar minimum of very great depth and short duration

...

Nevertheless, even in light of the uncertainties in particle flux from the existing literature, an event like the 774 CE event would need to be more than an order of magnitude larger than even the Carrington event, the most significant coronal mass ejection and accompanying geomagnetic storm ever observed in the instrumental era of science [54]. By considering possible beaming angles and uncertainties in models of the carbon cycle, Neuhäuser & Hambaryan [55] argue that the 774 CE event might be implausibly huge to be a single solar superflare. The solar proton event of 1956 produced an estimated 3.04×106 atoms/cm−2 of  14C [56]; depending on assumptions about its flare class and spectral hardness, the 774 CE event could correspond to an X-ray flare as bright as X1800, nearly two orders of magnitude larger than any previously observed

There is a wide space in time for the events with some quite close and then big gaps. We don´t have any historical stories for 774 CE but then they did not have telegraph lines. But it must have been visible in the sky?

If the grid goes down that would be a big problem especially in cities. Most people don´t have that much food around and the JIT delivery would fail.

If it is a really big event i think the casualties would be higher then 10% but of course we do not know which size was used in the modelling.

[kassy]

Tree rings offer insight into devastating radiation storms

...

A team led by Dr Benjamin Pope from UQ's School of Mathematics and Physics applied cutting edge statistics to data from millennia-old trees, to find out more about radiation 'storms'.

"These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years but what causes them is unclear," Dr Pope said.

"The leading theory is that they are huge solar flares.

"We need to know more, because if one of these happened today, it would destroy technology including satellites, internet cables, long-distance power lines and transformers.

"The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable."

Enter the humble tree ring.

...

The common theory until now has been that Miyake Events are giant solar flares.

"But our results challenge this," Mr Zhang said.

"We've shown they're not correlated with sunspot activity, and some actually last one or two years.

"Rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what we may be looking at is a kind of astrophysical 'storm' or outburst."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221025201137.htm

One problem we have with our astronomical observations is that most time series we have are not that long. They are longer then a human life but they drop of in detail soon if we go back in time. After WW2 people were still doing visual counting of dots on glass plates. Then if we move further back we have less and less. We do have some old greek star maps (see the rest anthropology of astronomy threads) and people research ancient literature for reports of eclipses too to refine rotation history. As far as i know there are no 774 reports which we would expect if it was a much stronger solar flare so it might be something else.

Bottom line: we have no real long detailed history for the sun especially not if we go by star time. This also goes for everything out there. On the other hand we do know that nothing that happened in the last million of years which was fatal to us so there´s that.

[morganism]

The pro-extinctionist philosopher who has sparked a battle over humanity’s future

Émile Torres has become a thorn in the side of the branch of moral philosophy that advocates prioritising our distant descendants. They explain the danger of utopian movements.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/22/pro-extinctionis-longtermim-effective-altruism-human-extinction-emile-torres

(...)
Torres was once a longtermist. They wrote a book six years ago under the name Phil Torres, called Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks, which essentially reiterated longtermist arguments.

But in the years since, they have not just turned away from longtermism but become its most vehement critic. So what drew them to the cause initially and why the change of heart?

“I really was a believer in the vision because I think there is a seductive attraction to grand visions of the future and big numbers,” they say.
(snip)
“I just hadn’t thought really deeply about the longtermist views,” they say. “Nor had I studied the history of utopian movements that became violent. And once I did that, I realised that longtermism is similar in all of the most important respects to many of these utopian movements that became violent. Because of that I became very worried about what this longtermist ideology could justify in the minds of true believers in the future.”
(...)
It’s an article of faith among longtermists that an event that led to the loss of 99% of humanity would be vastly preferable to one that kills off 100%. There is not a 1% difference, but the difference between a future filled with human flourishing and no future at all. That’s what’s known as the “opportunity cost”. And almost any action can be considered acceptable to avoid paying it.

It’s this kind of unapologetic utilitarianism that Torres believes is the most dangerous aspect of the longtermist perspective. They cite the tendency of longtermists to underplay the significance of the climate emergency because it’s not seen as likely to be the cause of total extinction. In Human Extinction, Torres quotes the philosopher Peter Singer, arguably the godfather of effective altruism, who has also been sympathetic to longtermism but guards against its most radical interpretations."

“Viewing current problems through the lens of existential risk to our species can shrink those problems to almost nothing, while justifying almost anything that increases our odds of surviving long enough to spread beyond Earth,” Singer has written."
(more)

[neal]

The pro-extinctionist philosopher who has sparked a battle over humanity’s future

Émile Torres has become a thorn in the side of the branch of moral philosophy that advocates prioritising our distant descendants. They explain the danger of utopian movements.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/22/pro-extinctionis-longtermim-effective-altruism-human-extinction-emile-torres

Emile Torres authored essay...

https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

[Alexander555]

The collaps of the maya's. Not completely comparable, maybe because of the modern fertilizer. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/new-clues-about-how-and-why-the-maya-culture-collapsed/

[kiwichick16]

a good explanation of the maya civilisation collapse contained in Jared Diamond's  " Collapse ; How Societies choose to Fail or Survive "

[neal]

The collaps of the maya's. Not completely comparable, maybe because of the modern fertilizer. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/new-clues-about-how-and-why-the-maya-culture-collapsed/

In your reference....“The Maya had cut down so much of that vegetation and changed it in so many ways, they were amplifying the aridity that was already present,” said Turner....

Amazon, are you listening?

[Alexander555]

Yesterday i was reading a paper, and the soil did still not fully recover after a 1000 years. It's a different vegetation compared to over here, and at your place. They don't drop their leaves for winter. So if they exhausted the soil. And destroyed all life. They had to start growing again in very bad conditions.