How Would a Nuclear EMP Affect the Power Grid?
How a nuclear blast in the upper atmosphere could disable the power grid.
The bundle deal with Curiosity Stream has ended, but you can still get a great discount on Nebula and support Practical Engineering here: go.nebula.tv/practical-engine...
Correction: 10:32 I meant to say "earth's magnetic field," not "earth's gravity."
Correction: A previous version of this video included a segment where I used a doorbell transformer to demonstrate core saturation. That model did not correctly demonstrate the phenomena I was describing, so I cut it from the video.
This video is a summary of the EPRI study on the impacts that a high-altitude nuclear electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) would have on the US power grid. It’s the first in a deep-dive series of videos about large-scale threats to the grid.
EPRI Study: www.epri.com/research/product...
Practical Engineering is a KZhead channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!
CONNECT WITH ME
____________________________________
Website: practical.engineering
Twitter: / hillhousegrady
Instagram: / practicalengineering
Reddit: / practicalengineering
Facebook: / practicalengineergrady
Patreon: / practicalengineering
SPONSORSHIP INQUIRIES
____________________________________
Please email my agent at practicalengineering@standard.tv
DISCLAIMER
____________________________________
This is not engineering advice. Everything here is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Contact an engineer licensed to practice in your area if you need professional advice or services. All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes.
SPECIAL THANKS
____________________________________
This video is sponsored by Nebula.
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Shutterstock, Pond5, and Videoblocks.
Music by Epidemic Sound: epidemicsound.com/creator
Tonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Source: • Elexive - Tonic and En...
Producer/Writer/Host: Grady Hillhouse
Editor: Wesley Crump
Production Assistant: Josh Lorenz
Script Editor: Ralph Crewe
Background Painting: Josh Welker
Graphics: Nebula Studios
📺Nebula comes free with a year of Curiosity Stream (for only $15/year!): curiositystream.com/practicalengineering 📚Looking for a great holiday gift idea? My new book is now available everywhere: practical.engineering/book
@10:32 "...disrupts Earth's gravity..." wait...what? Is that true? Do solar storms disrupt the gravity of Earth?
And Nuclear Melt Downs Come @ 42 CPM All Leak & Vent Cancer kzhead.info/sun/dpl6cq-FlmqLqHk/bejne.html
Lol, a 'smile diagram'... someone has a sick sense of humor 😆
@@mr.bulldops7692 No, it's a script error. Sorry about that. I have a correction in the video description.
@@PracticalEngineeringChannel could you point me to some resources about non-nuclear EMP's? I want to avoid popsci BS that most search engines are flooded with.
Grady, AM radio antennas are usually located nearer to the ground than FM antennas. The broadcast signal from an AM antenna can result in structures such as cranes becoming charged, resulting in high voltage, low current arcing. One of the oil tankers in our fleet reported that at a certain dock they experienced getting shocks when putting slings on the crane hook. The crew discovered if you held a small fluorescent bulb near the crane hook you could get it to light, Uncle Fester style. We found that there was an AM radio antenna nearby that was used occasionally by a radio station. When in use at the same time the ship's crane was being used the crane would become charged. In checking with commercial crane operators, this was a known phenomenon. One operator told us that they had issues when working on San Francisco Bay. It took some time, and a solution was worked out with the refinery, radio station and new safety practices for crane use on our ships. Oddly enough I probably was 30 years into my career before this problem was ever encountered. Bob
Why they put the highway guard rails in , we had to reduce power. Worker were getting rf burns!
your comment made me extremely happy, thank you ethan
But is your name Robert or Bob?
@@MysteryDash yes: Bob is short for Robert.
Thank you Bob. Arvid
VERY surprised you didn't mention 1962's Starfish Prime (1.5MT) which was over Johnston Atoll and it's subsequent EMP knocked out power and phones here in Hawaii for at least a few hours. Hawaii is nearly 900 miles away. Some LEO satellites also got knocked out because of it. It's a perfect answer to the videos question and a literal what would happen in the real world.
Exactly. People running for public office should have to talk about these subjects.
I was about to say that too about the Hawaii event for that high altitude nuclear test then. If I remember correctly the Soviets experienced the same thing for few of their nuclear tests as their over their own territory.
Heh, wrote the same comment before even checking others since I found the absence so odd. Why use the EPRI's results that basically say "don't worry about it," when we have another real world test? That said, when you get to it, a nuke has been used as a weapon, probably have bigger problems than a single high altitude blast, lol.
The reason it's not mentioned is that the claims you made about Starfish are either wrong or exaggerated. It blew a few streetlights (and the claim is not certain) and damaged a microwave link between islands.
@@kylesenior Think it was a little more than that..
I'm a retired electron pusher. I started as a microwave radio tech in the USAF (honor graduate Keesler AFB 04/1978). Over a 40+ year career, I moved from RF Tech to Engineering Tech to Design Engineer to PCB Layout Engineer to Senior EE with a major defense contractor. In fact I worked as a contractor since 1996, wearing many hats and mostly in aerospace and military design. Consequently, I have worked at times intimately with EMP and as SI (Signal integrity) oversight for an engineering department developing large integrated circuit test systems. My favorites were spacecraft and satellite design. The space environment is pretty unforgiving, and those devices typically cannot be brought back for repair. They have to function in the harsh environment of space. Your video was an excellent overview. My only comment is that the study you referenced specified a 1 megaton HEMP (high altitude EMP) detonation. That sounds a bit like hunting moose with a .22 rifle. In a tactical situation intended to disrupt, say, the United States, I would expect at least a 10 MT if not 20 MT device, and possibly more than one, e.g. one over the Appalachians at a latitude between ew York and Washington; oneover central Texas, and one over the Sierras on a latitude between San Francisco and LA. This would hit major population and technology centers while taking down all three major grids: NS along the East Coast, EW across Texas and the south-eastern US, and NS along the West Coast. As for the solar induced equivalent, we are actually overdue, statistically speaking, for another 1859 Carrington Event level solar CME (coronal mass ejection) impact. That one burned telegraph wires in two and set operators' equipment on fire, which was the most advanced electrical technology at the time. We just missed an even larger CME by less than 2 weeks in our orbit in 2012. It would have been a technology killshot. As you stated, the fast E1 pulse would couple into virtually all conductors, even the smallest, inducing spikes in the traces on integrated circuit (IC) silicon dies. We briefly discussed this in an IC Fabrication course I took around 2002. The copper traces on a printed circuit board (PCB), where components are typically mounted and interconnected, are also ready made antennas for the E1 pulse. I focused on PCB layout and signal issues for about 18 years of my career. The E2 period does indeed have many characteristics like lighting, and many lightening arrestors should handle it. The E3 pulse is another matter. In EMP and HEMP situations it is able to induce ground currents. In a solar CME induced planetary scale EMP, these could be significant, dwarfing the regular man-made HEMP. These are the currents most likely to destroy large grid regulating transformers and even generators. They can travel into electrical loops by a "sneak path", using the ground connection to enter electronics not designed with a robust power connection, and traveling "up" to the power source (normally the input power). Needless to say, a reverse current of high magnitude would be devastating to most equipment. I _DO NOT_ have experience in large scale power distribution, "The Grid", but warnings I have read indicate it, too, could be susceptible to such high reverse currents. Add this to the directly coupling E1 pulse, and there could be significant current and high voltage spikes tnduced into the windings in both transformers and generators. These transformers and generators are not off the shelf components, as the video stated. These are custom built OVERSEAS. In a worldwide event like the solar-induced EMP, it is very unlikely these will be replaced soon... if ever. Consider the events in New Orleans in the two (2) weeks following Hurricane Katrina. Once it became apparent that services like electricity, phones, and water were not going to be immediately restored, the social structure began to crumble. When it became known that supply trucks were not going to be able to resupply the supermarkets, the normal "three days of food on the shelves without resupply" was stripped in TWO HOURS. I also have a degree in psychology, and human dynamics in events like this are one of my areas of interest. One of my best friends had family in the area in Baton Rouge, and they experienced predatory behavior escalate as well. Given a probable loss of the power system due to Grid failure, collapse of the financial system due to loss of the communication system - no internet means no banking system, loss of transportation for food resupply, and loss of refrigeration for existing food storage AND medicines, and the situation in many urban areas will probably be much worse than the few weeks following Hurricane Katrina. Don't forget that no communication, no transportation (gas pumps run on electricity even if the vehicles' computers were not fried), and totally dark cities at night means no police or other order enforcing bodies. It could become very dire very quickly. Read _One Second After_ for a fictional depiction of a small town following an HEMP event written by an expert in EMP. This book was given to congressional members when a bill to harden the electrical grid was under consideration. My thoughts about that book were expressed exactly by the Naval Captain that wrote the epolog: I would love to have been able to read this as a work of science fiction, but I knew all too well that everything portrayed was entirely possible.
We've been mapped out. China knows exactly where to put them now. The recent balloon flew over 181 military installations. People, we're in trouble.
Last year I came across a couple of 100% foreign Chinese. Male and female. 52 miles to the closest town outside of Weed, California. They were stuck in a Mercedes RV. Spoke no English. Dressed like they were stuck in the early 80s and had alot of what looked like camera equipment and black boxes that had Chinese writing on it. The woman didn't speak. I'm not kidding when I tell you the guy made my hair stand up. Not friendly and demanded help...and "right now". Maybe he didn't know how he was coming off. But NONE OF IT MADE ANY SENSE. It has me wondering now. Were they "mapping" ?
@@giggity8249 Sounds a little like the weather balloon drifting off track in Feb., 2023. My inner Redneck says (at gunpoint): "Give me your camera, so I can see your pictures. Then I'll decide whether to just keep your camera and black boxes and let you go, or keep your camera and leave you here in the ditch."
Gee, I wonder if a country like, say, China could send over a weather balloon carrying an EMP generator.
I thank you for your accurate synopsis. I've spent my career as an electrical technician for one of the worlds largest steel companies. I would say that 80-90% of our hv transformers and electric motors are custom built per application, and probably the same for most of Americas infastructure building companies. I believe an EMP type event would probably be far more destabilizing than a localized nuclear event. I'd guess longstanding mutually assured destruction rules out the latter. An EMP would take us back to a pre-industrialized civilization for those able to make it long enough to avoid the horrors Mankind will do to itself until predation and starvation have killed most of us off. As a practicing Christian, I would rather a nuke fall on my house than to live through a nationwide EMP event. Hurricane Katrina would look like an afternoon thunderstorm compared to that. God Bless
I like how calmly this guy talks about the end of civilization
As an electrician, I have been involved in a lot of interesting construction projects. My favorite and most memorable one was an entire building that was built with EMP shielding. Just like an MRI room. It was a building to house the control center of a major city’s grid control. It looked very much like your footage of the grid control center in this video. I think you could do an entire long-form video about the engineering that goes into MRI rooms. They have copper walls and EM filters and wave guides. They can be huge or fairly small. The world-renowned company ETS-Lindgren is one that has done all the shielded rooms and buildings I’ve ever seen. They’ve done secret projects but also lots of health-care projects.
That does sound interesting. ✌️😎
Sadly, that is the exception. When I worked in the microwave center (later obsoleted by fiber) of the electric utility that employed me, we had a crew in to do a TEMPEST review of the facility. I never was told the result - no need to know - but it was obvious we were a sitting duck.
that would make a very interesting video! maybe a collab with Colin Furze haha
Sounds a lot like a certain energy company’s room in Virginia that I’m aware of, really wild stuff though.
We built one for the Air Force and just used 3/16th steel with filters and waveguides.
“A nuclear detonation is unwelcome in nearly every circumstance” is the understatement of a lifetime 😂 Great video Grady, really enjoyed learning about this!
Unless you need to breach the Shield Wall mountain range to approach Arrakeen
nukes were used to seal some gas wells in the soviet union.
A low yield nuclear detonation is quite common every time you eat a taco.
@@alexdrockhound9497 think that falls under nearly every circumstance
Unless you're a South Asian nationalist
Additional notes about transformers: Even small substation transformers cost $MM's. Additionally, they're often custom-sized specific to the substation they are installed at and the lines they are tied to. Manufacturers make them to order and they often have multi-year order-to-deliver dates. Even repairing a transformer can take over a year.
Would you know if it is possible to rewind them rather than replacing them entirely? I've had to rewind burned out transformers in old audio equipment where no replacement exists and/or the value of the item I'm repairing depends on everything being 'stock'. If these big substation transformers burn up, is the damage limited to the windings or does take out the laminates as well?
@@killingmasheen Rewinding is certainly possible, though it's a pretty long and complex process. If the protective relays trip fast enough to prevent damage beyond the coils, rewinding would be a faster alternative to building a brand new transformer
You really should do a little googling, about how electrical high voltage transformers work, and how they are made.. We still have the means to make them here in the US, the only reason most are made overseas, is due to labor costs..
Lead time for large oil filled transformers can be a year or more.
I recall a documentary about the power grid ( back in the heyday of history channel) that there was only 3 companies on earth that can produce the transformers and none were located in the north American continent. Any chance that is incorrect or not the case today?
You make some incredibly thorough, highly educational videos. I just discovered this channel and I must say, I love it!
Man, these Election Day ads are getting out of hand. Now I don't know which EMP plan to vote for! 🤣
I want to know why I turned off personalized ads and do not share location but I still get local re-election ads
Vote for the EMP that gives a 4th grader a school lunch instead of the one that makes them carry a pregnancy to full term.
@@KE5ZZO even with location services off it will try to generalize to an area like the state. Edit: Personalized ads are using cookies and browsing history, if anything I’d think you’d get less political ads with them on
This is why I pay for premium. It's worth $12/month to not be patronized as if I'm a severely intellectually disabled toddler!
Vote for EMP 42 - They guarantee equal destruction for all electronics!
You might find this interesting regarding an AM tower. Back in the early 1980s I worked at a radio station and for the AM side of the station, the tower was out behind the building. During storm there would be these pulses that would run through the system such that they would spike the needles on the monitoring needle gauges (old school). I would go outside to look at the tower and you could see and hear electrical pulses running down the guy-wires. It was amazing and scary at the same time. I never knew why it would do that (I'm not an electrical engineer or anything) but I assumed that the air was, like, "charged" from the surrounding storms and that was interacting with the "AM waves" and generating electrical current that was grounding down the guy-wires. Do you think AM towers still do that or do they ground them differently now?
I work on merchant ships and experienced something similar in a large thunderstorm in Colombia recently. Our MF/HF antenna started buzzing, almost a sizzling bacon sound. As soon as lightning would strike somewhere, the sizzling would immediately stop, then start building up again until the next flash. It was daytime but I was wondering if at night St. Elmo's fire would have been visible from the whip antenna
EE here, fundamentally during a lightning storm the clouds and ground form a large capacitor that slowly charges from the turbulence of the cloud mechanically separating charged particles. At the capacitor charges the electric field (measured as Volts per unit distance) also builds until the air itself undergoes dielectric breakdown and the capacitor shorts out in an event called lightning. Your antenna is grounded not to some universal 0 Volts but to the local dirt/ground which is having its voltage changed as its basically the bottom of the capacitor. To broadcast any signal from an antenna fundamentally just means to pump a voltsge wave through it, and this is added onto the natural electric field and when they combine the locally overwhelm the air. For the radar in the ship the bacon sizzling noise is from the radar pulses breaking down the air, but if every pointy part of the ship was crackling that would be the natural field from the storm. (And to my knowledge St Elmo's fire is the name for corona sparks on the rigging of ships by natural fields, i don't know if it applies to corona from the manmade power sources like radar, radios, or even transmission lines which often have corona issues resulting from the extreme voltage used to keep current down)
it is electrostatic induction. Thunder clouds are heavily charged and create strong electric field between the cloud and earth surface, and earth surface charges in response. Every sharp point connected to the ground starts to form corona discharge (if seen, these are called st. Elmo's fire). In strong radio-frequency fields of AM transmitter these torches of corona discharge can produce sounds and you may even hear the sound transmitted by this radiostation.
@@jasonreed7522 what a wonderful explanation. thank you!
@@elrond12eleven thank you for the explanation. it was powerful to witness and hear.
This is a great topic! Thanks for sharing, enjoyed watching!
Great Videos Thanks! As a Power Supply Designer for many years, I remember an experienced senior designer when I was fresh out of school told me: "When a transformer core saturates, it's just a piece of wood!"
One critique from a EE. In your Marx Generator experiment, you can see the spark jump to the picture frame. So, the resulting damage is more likely from the high voltage entering the case and not the EMP pulse triggered by the spark.
He kind of hints at that (it's direct injection, a LOT of external charges are injected there). But then he says that this might be "an indication" of what an EMP E1 pulse can do. I contend that when you only have the field itself acting on the electronic structure of the internal components, you probably won't get anything noteworthy in this case. At least as far as published E1 values from nuclear high altitude tests are concerned. The only way the EMP can damage things is by having a large enough antenna to build a voltage difference over which then enters unprotected circuits and fries them. But such circuits tend to have voltage protection on them so I don't think this kind of damage would actually be common.
Literally every electric installation has the housing grounded. This wouldn't even scratch anything of importance.
EMP is hard for even RF jocks to understand. It's VERY hard to explain to the average public without fibbing or over simplifying.
I actually had a VERY nearby lighting strike that fried my home router, and my brother's next-door. We had a Cat5 cable connecting our homes, running down the wall and underground. This seems to have acted like an antennae and allowed the EMP generated by the lightning strike to fry both of our home routers connected via that cable!
Oh, and I forgot to mention... we had already shut most of our powered devices and unplugged our computers and TVs. However, we did NOT disconnect our ethernet cables - which includes that one that ran between houses. That's the one that got us, even with no power on to our routers.
@@renkenbw Fiber is the future. 😄
Stealing internet? Nice.
@@mybossisdrunk Sounds more like sharing you fool, stealing is the act of taking without permission.
Local storms (50km away) would cause continual problems at some sites. The adoption of fibre optic connections cured this.
I once used a vandegraf generator to build up a surface charge across a bunch of my students holding hands and standing on desks to insulate them, when we discharged the person-circuit, it caused the television in the room to turn off and was not able to turn back on immediately. Wasn't able to reproduce that day but we had a fun few days of discussion afterwards
awsome
Tesla coils are awesome too!
Wasnt able to reproduce that day :D sounded like something else
It's terrific to find an educational KZhead video once in a while. Thank you.
The EPRI study is a source I've been using for years on educating other amateur radio operators regarding hardening electronics against EMPs. However an EMP is not my fear, a Carrington Event level CME is and is much more likely.
What
@@racistman928 coronal mass ejection aka what happens when the sun farts in your direction. The last time this happened was back when we were still using telegraphs.
@@leonguyen896 thanks
@@leonguyen896 xD the sun farts at us
Eyes open, no fear.
Your demo with the EM generator and multimeter is very similar to a bizarre flaw I discovered in a multimeter just a few days ago. I was using its continuity testing mode and suddenly it started beeping when I moved it near a printer. The EM waves produced in its power supply were apparently generating enough power in the leads that it mistook them for a closed circuit.
It sounds like that printer isn't anywhere near non-interference compliance
Laser printer I'd wager.
I had a radio from my fire department that I could point at various electrical equipment at work, and it was only 5watt, but I could get power supplies to reset. We were having an issue with a Canadian digital TV station making our motor controllers reset at semi random intervals... we ended up solving it by adding some ferrite cores and looping the communication cables in a zig zag rather than a round loop.
You have no clue how wrong you are and are ruining his life. Ukraine is not a country it is just a lie. Look at the electrodes from a insects perspective. You can build your own outhouse but cant build your own collection
@@naomi-g Inkjet. Also a microwave. Turns out the multimeter's fuse was blown. Once I replaced it it stopped picking up the interference.
Great video, as usual, Grady! After your explanation of the grid protections, and reading MG50's great comment below, it sounds like the E1 pulse would toast the delicate electronics and relays designed to signal and protect the slower/more mechanical protections built into the grid, leaving them unprotected. Then the E2 and E3 could really "fry the bacon", leaving us in camping mode.
I bought your book "...Plain Sight": fun and useful reading but perhaps a bit basic for my background. The "Keep an eye out" diagrams are a high point. More would have been welcome as I was hoping for a "guide to weird engineering structures seen from roadways" or something like that.. Overall good work, and thanks!
Protection and control engineer here - I design the control systems that trip the breakers using the digital relays mentioned in the video. Very informative way to explain this paper to the public, in a much more interesting manner! There are many utilities that are currently buying concrete control houses or having their control houses shielded with elaborate copper shielding systems on critical bulk electric system sites. These approaches (largely) mitigate the issue of E1 pulses affecting the control relays. It's proven much more difficult to prevent damage from the E3 events, as the protective relays we use now won't necessarily detect those conditions and trip everything offline. Furthermore, while your control relays may be shielded from most of the issues, your voltage transformers and current transformers out in the yard will not be as protected. If you can't rely on the data coming into your relays, you can't effectively trip and protect your equipment.
As someone not familiar with these systems, is it possible to shut everything down instantly from the NOC, or would you have to send a truck to every facility to isolate it manually?
@@user2C47 The vast majority of circuit break devices are remote operated and can be done from a central terminal at the utility control center. There would always be some that have to be manually operated, but those are typically more for redirecting power during partial blackouts rather than in order to protect the equipment.
How much more troublesome would a sequence of these events be? If there were say, dozens of overlapping pulses at different times?
Would it be helpful to put distribution points in valleys? Along mountain ranges you could put centers for the westward regions on the east side and vice versa. Up to a certain point it's not worth shielding things I'd guess.
In 2014 I was in an electrical maintenance program at my local college and one day I asked one of my instructors how long we could survive a widespread power outage. His answer: one month, yes...two months, no. It was sobering to realize we're only one massive solar storm away from utter catastrophe.
after three days, anarchy.
The practical reality is that a Carrington ++ event is overdue relative to the 12k year solar cycle. Sadly, even placing all electronic equipment within Faraday cages won't shield them from that event. No cellphones, no efi engines (no vehicle transportation), no power, no ac... P.S. forgot to mention : no power - no clean water, no medical care beyond first responder first aid.
The phrase is '9 meals from chaos'.....Day 1 without food you're hungry , Day 2 your desperate, Day 3 you'll do anything to get what you want/need.
@@Endlesspathable at least electronics can be recycled, rebuilt, or repaired.
Less than that, I call 3 days before folks, you know those folks, go nuts! See, agree, 9 meals, 3 days 👍
I had no idea the Navy did testing like this. My grandfather was a part of the LCS for the Boxer and had many stories to tell, and it’s awesome to stumble upon one of the things he assisted with
That is what the Navy and military do other than fighting of course
My Dad was on USS Boxer and stated he was on the deck in 50’s. He offered he helped with ‘catch and release’ and now I wonder of ‘what’. He worked in a wind tunnel and eventually balloon projects with NACA/NASA to progressing to senior leadership.
@@KaushikBala333 My father worked at naval research lab working on satellites. I tried every way I could to get him to tell me about what he did. I talked to him in his sleep to get him to tell me. I mean I'm your daughter you can tell me.. But not a word.
I used to work for a defence contractor producing military avionics [military radios for military aircraft], and we used to test for EMP in our military radios... and I remember the test set was able to generate a pulse with a 1KV peak in a 1ns rise time. This is a lot faster than lightning, which is typically 1KV peak, with a 1 microsecond. This is the EMP spec that we used for testing our avionics systems, as we had special test rigs for testing the effects of EMP. The power supply rails, such as the 5 Volt rail, had special zener diodes that would short out the power supply rails, and was designed to detect the gamma ray flux. It would create a short glitch for the radio, but protect against surges that might occur. In fact we tested a muzzle velocity radar unit, by putting it into a reactor, and the protection circuits worked. In addition that filter connector that connect to the radio system also had special EMP filters to protect the avionics.
The grid might not be protected, but I'm sure all our military installations are hardened to one degree or another.
@@kx8960 I built B1 Lancers and KA screen mean anything to you?
@@MountainFisher "KA screen"? Like a Faraday cage made of grounded copper mesh?
@@kx8960 Nope, it is aluminum screen covered with chemicals that is used between all electronics and lets the pulse just move through the plane without shorting anything out. Can apply it to anything like vehicles and such.
@@MountainFisher Ah, different material, same exact function: Faraday cage. Ignorant people are all scared of "EMP!", when it's not the issue people think it is. If you're close enough to a nuclear detonation for EMP to be a real thing, you've got MUCH bigger issues...
Grady, I have received your book and I have to say that it's great, clear concise and easy to understand. I knew when I ordered it that it would be based on North America but it is still a very useful text. The badges were a very nice and unexpected bonus. As an avid subscriber, all I can say is from one engineer to another, I tip my hardhat, well done sir!
Just got my signed copy of Engineering in Plain Sight. This book is totally stuffed with fascinating knowledge presented with Grady's signature teaching style we all know and love.
You missed something. A high voltage relay has a mechanical backup just in case the power is lost to the GE 745's (or whatever they are using). So even if a EMP hit the grid, it's still going to shutdown to protect the grid. A restart can take place with operators controlling the system. And yes, the grid does have lightening protection which reaches 1 gigawatt worth of power. Once the EMP has passed, the grid will reset and they can bring everything back up. There are many lightening protectors in the grid so you might lose some of the relays but not all of them and threw the SCADA control system will act as a controller to any part that might still be down. In short, an EMP will take the grid offline, however it will come back up within minutes of the event.
Thanks for all of the helpful information. Great job!
Grady, thanks for taking complex engineering concepts and breaking them down to easy to understand explanations. I always look forward to your posts!
I love your videos so much! I'm really a huge fan. Although this is a bit different from your normal videos this is still right up my alley. Electricity and EMR is so interesting and fascinating. Likewise I'm always keeping my eye out for infrastructure around me. Because of you I actually know so much more about my surroundings which I was always so curious about. Thanks for taking the time to share your passion with others, it has impacted my life in a good way. Thanks and have a good one.
Excellent presentation! I just subscribed! Very well broken down to us who are simple laymen.
Grady, you're a Genius! I'm not saying that I completely understand everything you said, but what I do pick up on is a tremendous help! Thank you Sir!
I got a tour of a Coast Guard station once and the final thing they showed us was standing next to their thousand foot antenna was holding a fluorescent light up near it and the light lit up. They also showed us where some protesters jumped the fence surrounding the antenna (plus the fence surrounding the Army base it was part of), anyway, they spray painted on the concrete base of the antenna. That person came within inches of becoming a very crispy critter because of the amount of amps that was in that antenna. Needless to say, we walked away with a heck of a lot more respect for those tower antennas.
Bummer that vermin WASN'T crisped...
5G towers??😳
Not 5G, if it’s a Coast Guard station it’s most likely either short wave radio, a M radio or UHF/VHF radio which is commonly used in the marine sector.
You can do the same thing under high voltage transmission towers. The field is immense, also do not park your car under transmission lines for any amount of time. When you try to get into your car you can get shocked from the induced current.
Woah it lit up a 40 watt bulb. Lol
At a major company I worked for in 1980, we had in-house courses, one was EMP and SGEMP. Bottom line, big transformers running near capacity can be destroyed by the third stage of an EMP because of the dissipation from a big DC current component. This fella I think is underestimating it.
put a large capacitor at input and output of output transformer, as we all know capacitors stop DC voltage but passes the 60 hz frequency voltage. And from video the transformers are heavily shielded so cannot see emp pulse sneaking into windings
Superb. Simply superb. Such fascinating well researched and well explained content, thank you.
Love these videos, you have great knowledge and insight
I sincerely appreciate how much attention you pay to pointing out when your demos are just decent conceptual illustrations as opposed to full on science experiments. That nuance gets lost way too often and it’s rad that you’re so careful with that. Great work as always!
how would it affect the power grid in a bad way obviously🤣🤣🤣
Thanks for this very accessible education. I’m very interested in the complex relationships you explain. The curated slides and graphs you find and show are equally revelatory of the underlying principles. I really enjoyed this episode!
This video was fascinating! You have to do a video on the effects on the grid from a Major Solar Storm
Great channel! Keep up the good work!
Just got your book and immediately went through it! Since I'm an artist, I examined the illustrations, and found a joke in almost all of them! The seagull flying away with your hard hat; the bird pooping on top of it while you eat your lunch...wonderful! I'm assuming since the little character has a red hard hat that it is you...which reminds me, whoever did your hat/glasses logo is really good. It's very effective in its simplicity. OK, back to reading some more and hopefully learning some engineering. And yes, I love the book! I may pass it on to a friend's kid, who is really intelligent and curious.
Grady, you deserve an award for your work. Awesome quality, absolutely no bias, wonderfully presented. Will subscribe to curiosity stream today. Thank-you!
✍️✍️✍️🤳🏿
Love juicy engineering details.
Wonderful explanation of this phenomenon.
I am so in for a "threats to the grid" series!
Me too!
SPOILER ALERT - the biggest threat is terrorism. I retired four years ago; at the time Stuxnet was still the top threat. I'm sure there are even worse ones in the field now, but Stuxnet is a hard act to follow.
@@flagmichael No, the biggest threat is the Sun farting at the Earth. Stuxnet cannot hold a candle to a Carrington Event sized cascade swarm of CMEs
Thanks for putting this out. I've been correcting people about EMPs for years and it is frustrating to not have a source that is fairly definitive while also keeping it simple enough for the average person to understand. I spent a lot of time reading through the papers available on this. Some were difficult to find. I'll be interested in what source material you found and your future videos on this subject. Well done so far.
✍️✍️✍️✍️🤳🏿
I hope you was telling them an emp wepon does not exist, i keep asking for a emp test video, not seen one. An emp from a nuclear weapon does not count.
@@aeroflopper Nearly all videos today are from digital cameras. Digital cameras are digital, and have electronic components in them. EMPs fry electronics. So unless you are standing really far away and/or have the camera EMP shielded, the EMP will destroy the camera. This also destroys the video. Someone could use film instead so it doesn't get fried, but unless you get some expensive, modern film, the video quality would be bad. You are asking for a recording of something that would destroy most direct recordings. You would be better off asking someone how they felt after a nuke was dropped on them; there are five people who lived fine after it.
I studied electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo focused on electromagnetics and spent my last work term at DREO (Defense Research Establishment Ottawa) doing research on nuclear electromagnetic pulse in 1993. Ummm... that's probably about all that I can legally say but I appreciate your video for providing insight into a topic that few people know anything about.
Thanks! My 95 year old uncle was heavily involved in the 1950s, conducting research on electromagnetic radiation releases for our government was more than curious concerning the yield of the Soviet nuclear detonations made at the time. Still secretive, my uncle mainly discussed the primitive conditions of his accommodations in the Pacific and Alaskan areas; than the study of electromagnetic pulses. Great video.
This topic reminds me of a book I read titled, "One Second After" that is a fictionalized story about 3 EMPs in this manner detonated to cover the entirety of the United States. It sounds like from your description in this video, the total damage in a real life scenario wouldn't be as bad as detailed in the book, but the book provides a good frame of reference for some downstream effects of a world without power, specifically on communications, logistics, and especially healthcare and the social ramifications of suddenly finding ourselves in this situation without preparation.
Great book! I’m halfway done the second right now “One Year After”
I read that too. Good book that puts in perspective how reliant we are on everything electronic from medical to cars, phones and computers, etc., but if all that failed, we’d be set back 200 years! Worst case scenario book, of course, but it makes you want to be prepared for any disaster, natural or otherwise.
Except that real EMP doesn't work the way the book describes, thankfully.
@@railgap maybe. But it depends on distance, intensity as well as other factors. (That I didn’t understand)
Plus in the book, two of the three detonated over North America. This video is only talking about one detonation. Great trilogy of books. I’ve loved them all.
The most disastrous effect is the creation of a strong, slowly-varying DC voltage across the long transmission lines, as you mentioned in the video. In such event, along a transmission line, the DC voltage causes the HV transformer to explode and the wires to melt, while the transients disable all the inductive loads. Thank you for the great video, Regards from the UK, Anthony
It doesn't cause anything to explode, including transformers - It causes them to get hot, slowly, over hours. There are protections against heat and they will get turned off. Loss of power yes, increase in heat, which means reduction in life (in terms of years), maybe. Explode, never.
Not a threat to the UK because it's network is more mesh like than the US.
Actually it is the current that kills the transformers in the way he described, and that is only an issue when run near the maximum current for the line. The transformers are damaged but the lines are not.
Why not guard the transformers with big capacitors ? Essentially just setting up a high pass filter
I helped publish hundreds of EPRI reports while in SF. They took the job internal though. This reminded me of those days. That is a common California thing, where people worked for a place then became contractors later then later the company took the opportunity back. It was my roommate who actually worked there in person. The PREPRESS days for before the dot come bust.
Great post. I really enjoyed this
(Edit) The Carrington event was another example of what happens when DC offsets are applied to the power grid, although back then it affected little more than telegraphs. If such an event were to happen today it could be catastrophic, probably much worse than a nuclear EMP. It's so scary the sun can in theory decide to do stuff like that without warning.
Thankfully it was the biggest one on record and hopefully it doesn't happen again in our lifetimes... But I'd love to see the northern lights!
@@redskyready I mean it's pretty much a given that we will see one in next 30 years or something. Hopefully we will be prepared for it at least somewhat.
On the contrary, anything the sun does will give us several hours warning before the charged particles hit the radiation belts. Enough time to disconnect all critical infrastructure from the power grid.
It doesn't decide, it just is.
Entirely different mechanisms, though. Here in Arizona we have no problems with CMEs, largely because of the distance from the magnetic pole but partly because our transmission lines are primarily north/south. CMEs are nothing like an E3 pulse - they are prolonged DC currents.
Edit: You already updated the corrections and errors list in the description! Really nice to have that. Og comment: 10:32 - audio error where you mention a solar event disrupting Earth's Gravity. (Sorry, I know that you're going to get a lot of these.) Really great video otherwise, very interesting topic and well researched information!
This is the sort of thing KZhead annotations were great for fixing before they were removed for nonsensical reasons.
Hopefully we can get this comment boosted to minimize the total number of similar comments... or at least group them together. (Yeah, I came down to the comments for the same reason!)
You are a good teacher. Thank you.
Thank You for this video
Great job on the book, its even better than I was expecting!
Back in the early seventies, my dad, who worked for Honeywell, was trying to develop an EMP proof re-entry guidance system for ICBM's The concept, was to use fluid dynamics as a form of current in a circuit.
Are you referring to hydraulic circuits? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy
11:02 Interesting... WSM 650 AM had a tower that at one time was the tallest structure in Tennessee. I lived ~2 miles south of it. >30 years ago when I'd pick up the home phone, I could hear the radio station on it.
Please make a second part which tells us what we are supposed to do if that happens.
You should ask "What should I do before an EMP attack?"
@@raulthepig5821 sure. Do you know what to do before?
@@sirfanatical8763 Why do you ask?
@Nathan Melia ok thanks
As a kid, around 1950, I saw a live telecast of a nuclear explosion in Nevada. The TV microwave relay system had been built that far west by then. The countdown reached zero and then the picture broke up because an EMP took the camera off-air. But it took only a few seconds and some good whacks to get a picture of the mushroom cloud on the air. Vacuum tube electronics is much more resilient.
✍️✍️✍️✍️🤳🏿
EMP from ground based detonations is very localized.
Your video does a great job of explaining the effects of a Nuclear EMP. As you stated, the E3 will add a DC component to the AC input to a transformer. If this causes the transformer core to become saturated there will be no back EMF and the current will only be limited by the resistance of the winding. This excessive current will quickly burn out the primary winding of the transformer.
my power went out as i was watching this, amazing timing. seems like it was recloser action
Thank you for the video.
BTW, I'd recommend your book to anyone who wants a really clear, concise explanation of various common engineering applications. Well written, beautifully illustrated, read this instead of nerding out on twitter or something! A real book, held in a pair of human hands--what a great idea! Get the book! You'll love it!
Thanks for adding to my knowledge base! Retired now, but was an FCC-licensed electronics tech for several decades. I knew EMP is a problem. but now I know how and why.
I like the view from the John Hancock building at 13:59. Reminds me of the times I was in my dad's apartment when he used to live there as the chief stationary engineer.
thx for the link
Living in a hurricane area, I see how crazy people get after just a few days with no power…and this is an area we expect to lose power…or should. Imagine weeks/months for large regional areas.
Yup. And year after year, our population grows more emotionally dependent on electric service and internet continuity. Public reaction to service outages in my city is markedly more animated than during the Katrina/Ike era.
And with no help coming.
Blackouts (from storms) do not happen often here, not today anyway, but I can remember some longer ones from few years ago, like a few days blackout, and nobody cared, it was inconvenience at best, so maybe it depends on area/country.
I have an electrical engineering degree. This was one of my favorite/interesting videos of yours, I watch you all the time! Thanks!
Glad I ran across this video. I just received an ad trying to sell prepper supplies saying that we're gonna have a nationwide 1 year total blackout. Sounds like a bunch of hype after watching your vid. Thank you
I had a lightning bolt strike my apartment building. I don't think it hit any mains supply as nothing tripped - but one corner of my living room had basically everything fried. I later learned that is where the lightning rod's ground wire was routed, so it seems the EMP induced from that line caused an overload in appliances within about 3m (10 feet) of that corner, including my amplifier, television and a digital clock.
Sounds like an origin story to me. You should start testing yourself for superpowers, immediately. Good luck...Lightning bolt Liam! ⚡and Use your power wisely.
7:34 I discovered early in my broadcast engineering career that a two-stroke string trimmer will create similar effects. I had the announcer/DJ look out his window at x:55 on Wednesdays to make sure the landscaping crew wasn't on the same side of the radio station building as the dish antennas for the network news. If they were out there, the jock would run out and give them a ten minute break, so the top of the hour news wouldn't be interfered with. The RFI coming from the Weedeaters would swamp the C band LNA if they were within line-of-sight.
My father worked in civil defense for decades. Back in the 80s he told me the weakness in restoring our power grid was the glass insulators. They were manufacturer in Belgium and the US didn't have a stockpile. He also believed suitcase "dirty" bombs could cause more damage because of their size, portability, and ease of detonation.
Worked along side a regional government office that was the "stock pile" of those insulators. The people who worked in the building worked directly with the power administrations for the Federal. When I asked about high level problems that were beyond the stock pile capabilities they all laughed like I asked them to summon gold from my coffee. The quote that stuck with me and have asked several other people in the field about, "If its bad enough for the news to know about, the news wont be there to know about it"
Luckily, glass insulators are simple enough that they could be manufactured by a hobby glass artisan in his backyard.
Belgian here. To hell with USA, enjoy the melt.
Your "dirty bomb" scenario may do various kinds of damage, but unless it was detonated at a significant altitude, it probably wouldn't have the EMP effects Grady describes here.
A dirty bomb is just conventional explosives packaged with radioactive material, there's no EMP.
You should hear the 'growling' that comes from a step-up transformer during a solar magnetic event. We monitor temperatures and ground current much more frequently during such a storm. Great video!
Great book called Burning the Sky goes over in depth Hard Tack and a whole bunch of other high altitude test. Excellent read.
I was at a meeting at EPRI a few years ago where I heard an interesting presentation about challenges associated with a black start of grid, with one of the potential causes being EMP. I hope one of your future videos addresses this question.
I'm an absolute layman but I ave have the picture of thousands of people around the country trying to sync their 60hz turn in all at the same time. :) Totally possible, sure!
He has previous videos on blackouts. I don't think he's ever comprehensively covered what a black start would look like, but he's talked about how blackouts/brownouts are often done on purpose (i.e. here in Texas last year) to keep black starts from being necessary. I can't even imagine what a logistical nightmare that would be...
@@crystalsoulslayer I recall his description of the Texas blackout. Definitely another interesting story.
@@gizmophoto3577 Thinking about it, there might be real-world examples of black starts he could draw from. Puerto Rico, for example, lost power for absolute ages after a hurricane. I'm not sure it's entirely back online to this day. Not even close to the same size as the mainland US, obviously, but could still be an interesting case study.
I hope you have a video planned on the solar flare that ignited telegraph wires. Such a cool video. Thanks for all the content!
Very informative
VERY interesting - My Dad was involved via SRI Institute for the DoD in some of the testing measurements - they had a pair of former trailers attached to an old Victory ship down in the Southern Ocean - I believe, south of the Tasman Sea. He'd also be involved in Operation Fishbowl and other such projects after finishing his Masters in EE (I was conceived during Fishbowl ). He TRIED to explain it when we were in our early teens... he had some GREAT slides from the measurement sites.
The utility I consult for is somewhat prepared for an EMP strike. There are a handful of hardened buildings that are basically Faraday cages storing relay equipment. The newer control houses also provide more protection
We use more electronics than ever before, but that might not be as big of a problem as it first seems. I've read that while smaller electronics are more vulnerable to spikes, at the same time, modern electronics are more hardened against electromagnetic interference, and their small size means that they'll be less exposed to the waves as well. I think in the end, it may depend on the location of the devices, their quality, and maybe even their orientation if they survive or not. Though let's hope we never have to find out.
Very true for small electronics. On the flip side I hope that the power grid and comm infrastructure with their inherent size susceptibility are designed to be robust enough.
Wait, what? Might be very wrong but I do not believe that ANY electronics are "hardened" against EMP unless specifically designed to be so. Can't imagine that the 5 dollar wall wart has ANY level of "hardening". Might be some EMI shielding around the RF side of some items, that is not "hardened". The US power grid is really about at the breaking point, some states don't even have redundancy with other states...oops, that is just one state. (Not trolling or starting a fight BTW)
@skunked42 a lot of electronics are hardened at the circuit board level for anything that used that. There's a lot more fussing and circuit breakers in most modern electronics now.
@@imjashingyou3461 I've never seen a circuit breaker in a consumer electronic device, and fuses are, if anything, less common than they were fifty years ago (though mainly because we simply need fewer power supplies for modern electronics). Nor do either of these have anything to do with EMP: they are for protection against starting ordinary fires of the sort that anything that generates enough heat can start.
@Curt Sampson maybe it's just because I'm involved in aviation. But everything has multiple circuit breakers and that's for power surges.
Nice work
Very interesting, informative and worthwhile video. I would be helpful if you did a video on how to protect personal devices ( smart phones, tablets, flash drives, walkie-talkies) from an EMP and a CME. Do Faraday bags offer sufficient protection? Many thanks.
@Practical Engineering, EPRI is typically pronounced 'ehp/ree' in the energy industry! Source - I've worked in the energy industry for 7 years! Always love your content!!
Can confirm, I work in nuclear plants, and this is what it's called.
Excellent video! As someone that hardens critical communications sites this was the first video that I can’t find any real faults with on the subject! Thanks for making a video that’s based in science vs just scaring people!
Thx for noting that. This is golden. I wonder if most ppl even understand how golden.
Man that was a fascinating and well put together presentation.. I feel absolutely paranoid and terrified now lol
Off Grid TREK in Canada sells a large "Faraday cage" bag for storing sensitive electronic devices you may need in an emergency like radios, smart battery power sources, etc. This bag protects against strong EMPs. They also are most known tor their highly efficient foldable solar "blankets" for use in car camping, RV and home power outage situations with a smart lithium storage battery.
They are also known for being a massive scam because they don't work and their only market comes from bored people gooning and bating to a technological event that isn't even possible
How appropriate of a topic. Thanks for the additional info.
I'm wondering if this gets shadow-banned or shutdown. We're going to see in a few days.
@@tegimr yes I was thinking that also. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if it did.
Could you follow this up with a video of the effects of a massive CME effects on the grid?
My father at the time was on leave from the Australian army and was at his property in northern Queensland here in Australia where I am right now. He built a ham radio broadcast shack which in fact I'm in right now cause its air conditioned and nice and cool. When that nuclear bomb was detonated he was having a conversation with a guy in Guam when suddenly the guys signal was cut for about a minute. Dad noted in his radio book the time and later on he did some research with the help of the Australian army and found out it was the emp that cut his signal. Dad didn't know much about nuclear emp's but he had heard about them and that america was testing out in the bikini atol and the English were testing here in Australia. He also detected the Russian tsar bomb with his radio equipment which I still own now he has passed away. I was on a boat of the coast of Queensland and 200 kms east of the barrier reef when I heard the volcano erupting when the sonic boom was generated
In addition to being concerned about grid protection devices being susceptible to EMPs, I also think about the effects of faults due to the (unknown, but possibly large) number of improperly configured protection devices in service now. We won't know they're wrong until they're needed.
It's worth remembering that we have a constant, immense nuclear explosion going off 8 light minutes above the ground, and it sometimes behaves badly. Large solar events are certainly a concern to grid designers and operators. I wonder how much the mitigation efforts of the past few decades vs solar events will also help vs EMP.
Ever since the EMP problem has entered popular discussion, I've wondered why the lightning arresters on the grid couldn't handle it. Thank you for answering that question for me. Of course lightning arresters aren't perfect either. They do occasionally short to ground. I saw this at the manufacturing plant where I'm working now. We had lost a phase of incoming power, and we called the power company. A lineman came, and quickly identified that a clamp had burned through, and had come off the line. He put a new clamp on, and reconnected it. He was instantly encased in a ball of light. Then everything went dark. After a few moments, I asked, "Hey man, are you okay?" He responded with a dejected sounding, "Yeah. But I'm going to have a HELL of a sunburn in the morning." What we didn't consider was the reason the clamp burned through to start with. The lightning arrester had shorted, creating a huge current path that overloaded the clamp capacity. He didn't have a new arrester, so we just disconnected it so the plant could get running again, and we scheduled the replacement for the next day the plant was down for maintenance.
The E1 component has a very fast rise time of about 2 to 4 nanoseconds. The rise time for a lightning hit is around 15 milliseconds. The absorbers are stacks of zinc oxyboride which is the same stuff used in surge arrestors. It will be seen as a very low value capacitor by the pulse while the winding set in the transformer will be seen as a much higher value capacitor between windings. Therefore the current will prefer to conduct through the windings to the grounded core. If not energized it would not cause much damage but if energized it would ignite an electrical arc inside it.
You Tube better take a good look at their algorithm if it's taken this long for you to show up in my suggestions. Subscribed.
As a power system engineer, I enjoy the heck out of your perspective! Can't wait for the next one. Don't love the disconnected stock photo at 5:25 though...
I think that the rocket in the photo is meant to represent an ICBM in flight
So refreshing to hear some science-based commentary. Love all your video.
EMP's DO NOT EXIST! Nothing but a figment of the imagination of the ClA, propagated by Hollywood!
@@kidwave1 People that spent a lifetime learning science could sure use the revelation from the guy that flunked 7 grade science.
@@geppettocollodi8945 Says the guy who has never seen or witnessed, or has ANY proof whatsoever that "EMP's" exist ....AND NEVER WILL! But go ahead and add that to your giant pile of "things to fear". Thats the intent anyway.
@@kidwave1 There is nothing to fear about EMP. You will be dead before you know it. There is being irrationally fearful and then there is being so ignorant to fear nothing.
Fantastic video
The three letter combination "USB" has two very separate and distinct definition. One USB refers to upper sideband which is a form of voice transmission sounds the nearly switched position on your receiver call the SSB or single side band or side band and selecting that position will allow you to understand ham radio voice transmissions.. Went out to use of that switch, ham radio voice communication is hard to understand. So if you're little receiver radio does not have a SSB or USB switch then you won't be able to understand many voice ham radio transmissions. However the abbreviation USB is also used in ham radio language to refer to hey kind of socket that will be on the side of the computer. And then utilization the abbreviation USB does then refer to radio communication but instead very kind of socket that is used on computers. These are two totally different utilizations of the same 3 letters and can cause confusion.
There should be zero confusion when talking about Upper Side Band vs Universal Serial Bus. They're two completely different things and anyone who knows anything about them would know immediately which one you're talking about. It also stands for Unified S-Band, Upflow Sludge Bed and Urban Service Boundary, among other things.