Solar Flare Could Unleash Nuclear Holocaust Across Planet Earth, Forcing Hundreds Of Nuclear Power Plants Into Total Meltdowns

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it’s right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it’s that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization.


But what if human civilization faced a far greater threat than a single tsunami destroying a nuclear power facility? What if a global tidal wave could destroy the power generating capacities of all the world’s power plants, all at once?


Such a scenario is not merely possible, but factually inevitable. And the global tidal wave threatening all the nuclear power plants of the world isn’t made of water but solar emissions.


The sun, you see, is acting up again. NASA recently warned that solar activity is surging, with a peak expected to happen in 2013 that could generate enormous radiation levels that sweep across planet Earth. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has even issued an urgent warning about solar flares due to strike in 2012 and 2013. IBtimes wrote, “With solar activity expected to peak around 2013, the Sun is entering a particularly active time and big flares like the recent one will likely be common during the next few years. …A major flare in the mid-19th century blocked the nascent telegraph system, and some scientists believe that another such event is now overdue.” (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194…)


The story goes on to explain:

“Several federal government studies suggest that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in some areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers.”


Why does all this matter? To understand that, you have to understand how nuclear power plants function. Or, put another way, how is nuclear material prevented from “going nuclear” every single day across our planet? 

Every nuclear power plant operates in a near-meltdown state

All nuclear power plants are operated in a near-meltdown status. They operate at very high heat, relying on nuclear fission to boil water that produces steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity. Critically, the nuclear fuel is prevented from melting down through the steady circulation of coolants which are pushed through the cooling system using very high powered electric pumps.


If you stop the electric pumps, the coolant stops flowing and the fuel rods go critical (and then melt down). This is what happened in Fukushima, where the melted fuel rods dropped through the concrete floor of the containment vessels, unleashing enormous quantities of ionizing radiation into the surrounding environment. The full extent of the Fukushima contamination is not even known yet, as the facility is still emitting radiation.


It’s crucial to understand that nuclear coolant pumps are usually driven by power from the electrical grid. They are not normally driven by power generated locally from the nuclear power plant itself. Instead, they’re connected to the grid. In other words, even though nuclear power plants are generating megawatts of electricity for the grid, they are also dependant on the grid to run their own coolant pumps. If the grid goes down, the coolant pumps go down, too, which is why they are quickly switched to emergency backup power — either generators or batteries.


As we learned with Fukushima, the on-site batteries can only drive the coolant pumps for around eight hours. After that, the nuclear facility is dependent on diesel generators (or sometimes propane) to run the pumps that circulate the coolant which prevents the whole site from going Chernobyl. And yet, critically, this depends on something rather obvious: The delivery of diesel fuel to the site. If diesel cannot be delivered, the generators can’t be fired up and the coolant can’t be circulated. When you grasp the importance of this supply line dependency, you will instantly understand why a single solar flare could unleash a nuclear holocaust across the planet.


When the generators fail and the coolant pumps stop pumping, nuclear fuel rods begin to melt through their containment rods, unleashing ungodly amounts of life-destroying radiation directly into the atmosphere. This is precisely why Japanese engineers worked so hard to reconnect the local power grid to the Fukushima facility after the tidal wave — they needed to bring power back to the generators to run the pumps that circulate the coolant. This effort failed, of course, which is why Fukushima became such a nuclear disaster and released countless becquerels of radiation into the environment (with no end in sight).


And yet, despite the destruction we’ve already seen with Fukushima, U.S. nuclear power plants are nowhere near being prepared to handle sustained power grid failures. As IBtimes reports:

“Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours. Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem. If the spent fuel rod pools at the country’s 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations aren’t sufficient to guarantee those pools won’t boil over — exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation.” (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194…)


Now, what does all this have to do with solar flares?

How the end of modern civilization will most likely occur

As any sufficiently informed scientist will readily admit, solar flares have the potential to blow out the transformers throughout the national power grid. That’s because solar flares induce geomagnetic currents (powerful electromagnetic impulses) which overload the transformers and cause them to explode.


You’ve probably witnessed this yourself during a lightning storm when lightning unleashes a powerful electromagnetic pulse that causes a local transformer to explode. Solar flares do the same thing on a much larger scale. A global scale, in fact.


The upshot of this situation is that suddenly and without warning, the power grid infrastructure across nearly the entire planet could be destroyed. As a bonus, nearly all satellites will be fried, too, leaving GPS inoperable and causing millions of clueless drivers to become forever lost in their own neighborhoods because they never paid attention to the streets and always relied on a GPS voice to tell them, “In fifty feet, turn right.”


Communications satellites will be obliterated, too. This, of course, will halt nearly all news propaganda distribution across the planet, causing tens of thousands of people to instantly die out of the sheer fear of suddenly having to think for themselves. As another bonus, nearly all mobile phone service will be disrupted, too, meaning all the teenage text junkies of the world will, for the first time in their lives, be forced to lay down their iPhones and interact with real people in the real world.


But the real kicker in all this is that the power grid will be destroyed nearly everywhere.

What happens when there’s no electricity?

Imagine a world without electricity. Even for just a week. Imagine New York City with no electricity, or Los Angeles, or Sao Paulo. Within 72 hours, most cities around the world will devolve into total chaos, complete with looting, violent crime, and runaway fires.


And if you think you can just drive away from the chaos, think again: The solar flare will fry all automobiles that rely on ignition electronics, which means probably 98% of the vehicles on the road today will be instantly rendered scrap metal (or plastic, as it turns out).


But that’s not even the bad news. Even if all the major cities of the world burned to the ground for some other reason, humanity could still recover because it has the farmlands: the soils, the seeds, and the potential to recover, right?


And yet the real crisis here stems from the realization that once there is no power grid, all the nuclear power plants of the world suddenly go into “emergency mode” and are forced to rely on their on-site emergency power backups to circulate coolants and prevent nuclear meltdowns from occurring. And yet, as we’ve already established, these facilities typically have only a few hours of battery power available, followed by perhaps a few days worth of diesel fuel to run their generators (or propane, in some cases).


Did I also mention that half the people who work at nuclear power facilities have no idea what they’re doing in the first place? Most of the veterans who really know the facilities inside and out have been forced into retirement due to reaching their lifetime limits of on-the-job radiation exposure, so most of the workers at nuclear facilities right now are newbies who really have no clue what they’re doing.


There are 440 nuclear power plants operating across 30 countries around the world today. There are an additional 250 so-called “research reactors” in existence, making a total of roughly 700 nuclear reactors to be dealt with (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/i…).


Now imagine the scenario: You’ve got a massive solar flare that knocks out the world power grid and destroys the majority of the power grid transformers, thrusting the world into darkness. Cities collapse into chaos and rioting, martial law is quickly declared (but it hardly matters), and every nation in the world is on full emergency. But that doesn’t solve the really big problem, which is that you’ve got 700 nuclear reactors that can’t feed power into the grid (because all the transformers are blown up) and yet simultaneously have to be fed a steady stream of emergency fuels to run the generators the keep the coolant pumps functioning.


How long does the coolant need to circulate in these facilities to cool the nuclear fuel? Months. This is also the lesson of Fukushima: You can’t cool nuclear fuel in mere hours or days. It takes months to bring these nuclear facilities to a state of cold shutdown. And that means in order to avoid a multitude of Fukushima-style meltdowns from occurring around the world, you need to truck diesel fuel, generator parts and nuclear plant workers to every nuclear facility on the planet, ON TIME, every time, without fail, for months on end.


Now remember, this must be done in the middle of the total chaos breakdown of modern civilization, where there is no power, where law enforcement and emergency services are totally overrun, where people are starving because food deliveries have been disrupted (all the vehicles got fried in the solar flare, remember?), and when looting and violent crime runs rampant in the streets of every major city in the world. Somehow, despite all this, you have to run these diesel fuel caravans to the nuclear power plants and keep the pumps running.


Except there’s a problem in all this, even if you assume you can somehow work a logistical miracle and actually deliver the diesel fuel to the backup generators on time (which you probably can’t).


The problem is this: Where do you get diesel fuel?

more here