Just another BS scare tactic from National Geographic. Conflating the Sutxnet virus with a fake video (The Aurora Generator Test” is simply unethical.
NG is so far out there in left field they have marginalized themselves to anyone with half a brain left to think with. Global warming/climate change controls most of their thinking these days.
Just another BS scare tactic from National Geographic
Guess you weren't around when we had the cascade failure in the United States on the East Coast in 2003 and in 1965. In both events, a "small" error caused a domino-effect cascade that took out a large area of the US and Canada. The cascade occurred because the safety equipment did exactly what it was supposed to do, protect the electrical equipment from damage.
The 2003 error cascade started with a computer error. It snowballed from there.
As for the "danger" of the Sun causing trouble, we already know from prior experience that a coronal mass ejection can cause significant problems. The ejection of 1859 affected telegraph systems around the world, including shocking the operators with the induced voltages. Some of the disruption scenarios that have been postulated are based on extrapolating that event against the current electrical infrastructure.
Is it a "crisis"? No. Is is a major concern? Yes. Research continues on how to prevent the CME from causing widespread damage to the world's electrical networks. Yes, there will be outages, but if the basic gear isn't melted down, recovery would take days instead of years.
One "solution" being floated is to reduce our dependence on long-haul transmission lines, by building small plants closer to the consumers. By distributing power generation, failures would be more localized, and the overall effect of a CME would be reduced. (Another benefit: terrorists would have to hit more targets to have the same effect.) Also by distributing more, smaller, generators, a failure in one place won't translate to failures over very, very large areas. The faults would be contained.
You need to keep up dude. Power grid failure is the number one concern at NASA where our nephew works. Its not if it will happen its when it will happen.
From the link:
In March 2007, researchers at Idaho National Laboratories (INL) conducted an experiment labeled the Aurora Generator Test to demonstrate the results of a simulated cyberattack on a power network. In a video released by the Department of Homeland Security, a power generator turbine, similar to many now in use throughout the United States, is forced to overheat and shut down dramatically, after receiving malicious commands from a hacker.
The researchers at INL were investigating results of a possible cyberattack directed against a vulnerability that, reportedly, has since been fixed.[1]
The video, however, implied that other multiple power generators sharing similar cyber vulnerabilities could potentially be disabled the same way.
http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Aurora_Generator_Test
Homeland is attempting to stir the pot - there’s a reason they’re attempting to turn into Obama’s private army... and fake claims give them power. This is an outrage.