Electronic Components

Well, I built this:

I am thinking that should hold up pretty well.

However, I am thinking that nuclear war is not an extremely likely event and hardly worth paying for Rad-Hard components in our consumer electronics. Military and emergency components might be another story, but these would be pretty specialized.

After all, my amplifier may be unscathed, but it is not likely there will be residential electricity to power it and chances are anyone left will find playing music pretty low on the survival list.

Another way of looking at this is would you want to pay a premium for your new home in Florida just so it could be made earthquake proof? Probably not.

Exactly why I maintain an old tube (valve for some of you ) style Ham radio!

Living in an area full of defense contractors there may not be any need to plan for life after a nuclear war starts.

From the looks of the devices that are now being included in cars all over the world, transportation will be an issue for an EMP. My "old" truck will still run, and my bike is always non-electronic!

And you are correct about the high cost of "hardened" devices...just not going to happen.

Electronic devices made by military contractors are generally hardened, but consumer products are largely unprotected. Resistance to nuclear EMP is not the only reason to harden electronics. In the 1850s an extreme solar flare actually melted telegraph wires all over North America. If the same thing happened today it would destroy the power grid, nearly all communications devices, most computers, and the electronics that make our cars and trucks run. Food distribution would stop. The economy would collapse. Millions would starve. It will happen eventually. A much-less powerful solar flare in the 1960s knocked out power to parts of Canada and the northeastern U.S. We need laws requiring the power grid and all new important electronic devices to be hardened.

The problem is expense. We could currently encapsulate all grid and substation transformers in a Faraday cage; nothing high-tech here. Our power bills would probably have to double or triple to pay for it. Now all that is left is the massive generators connected to the turbines; they need protection as well. Oh and BTW all of the control rooms where the plants are controlled must also be protected.

Even if all this apparatus is protected, it won't make any difference. As consumers, we won't have anything left that will operate on electricity (except for AH's amp...but I doubt the transformers would survive).

A Faraday cage is just a metal box. Most industrial buildings, large transformers, and some computers are already made that way; it's just a matter of sealing any large holes. Cars and trucks are mostly metal. Shielding the control units should be no big deal. I suspect that filters and fuses can limit damage to most other equipment. With a little notice people could protect small electronic devices by stashing them in a microwave oven, but people can live without cell phones, iPods, and TVs. Power, transportation, communication, and business computers are what really need protection.

Russell is right, it won't take World War III. No one alive today has experienced a truly severe solar flare, but their frequency seems to be measured in centuries, not millennia. No one in written history has experienced a coronal mass ejection (heaven forbid), but even a glancing blow from one of those could do far worse than fry our computers.

Anyone who thinks these things won't eventually happen is kidding themselves. Space is a hostile place and our sun a sometimes-hostile ally. Protect the most critical parts of the power grid -- the ability to generate -- and at least humanity will have the power to rebuild. We can always string new wires, just as telegraphers did a century-and-a-half ago. With no protection at all, we could easily, as Einstein said of World War IV, be reduced to sticks and stones.

You are concerned with EMP. So you want the rest of the planet to triple their energy bills, expend unknown amounts of money to harden their homes and businesses, and add additional unknown sums to all electric appliances so that you can play video games after the big one goes off? Did I understand your point, or did I read something into it that wasn't there?

There is a much simpler solution, purchase backup computers, tv's etc, wrap them in aluminum foil and bury them in your back yard, be certain to draw a treasure map so that you can find it, print it with archival paper and inks, and keep it in your freezer. I also recommend you cover some of your extremities with tin foil to keep out the z-rays.

Even better (and simpler), just do what prepared people do down here in Florida. Keep a store of at least two weeks of food, water, meds, candles, fuel, cash, batteries, games, maybe even a firearm, flashlights, books, a radio, and maybe even a generator.

All those electronic items you burry in the ground are still not going to work if the power is out.

Video games, aargh. Look around you. There is nothing in our world that isn't made with the aid of electricity. We lost the ability to cope without it when steam and iron became oil and steel. Lose it now and you'll be dipping candles in the New Dark Ages. Be glib if you want to, but I'm not so comfy about it.

hi guys, long time.

about boxes as Faraday cages. the openings to the box are a big problem. when i was in industry, we used Beryllium finger strips. they are pretty pricey. bolt pattern works if the wave length isn't smaller than your bolt spacing. does anyone have a guess or know what the wave lengths we are talking about, and bolt spacing to actually work?

also, signal cable shielding is a real problem. we used flexible zipper closure over wire mesh cloth, wrapped around the cables. the mesh can be grounded at both ends.

The shortest microwaves are about 1 millimeter, which is why the screen in the door of a microwave oven has slightly smaller holes. Radio waves are longer and easier to block. A long thin crack polerizes and attenuates interference. Baryllium figers will block that too, which is important if you want to keep the KGB from spying on your embassy, but not usually required for basic circuit protection. Obviously, it's not practical to protect everything, but I think that WidgetMan is right about giving priority to power plants. Power lines and substations can be protected with fuses. Vehicles and business computers (eg the banking system) are important too, but if we had to go without TV for a while, we'd probably get more work done.

You and widget have no idea of what an EMP blast can do. There is another thread dealing with lightning protection, I suggest you both read it. There is absolutely no way to require consumer electronics to be hardened to the extent required. In addition no one could afford it if it were possible. Do you really think "fuses" can protect a power grid, when it is connected to hundreds of miles of "antenna"? You are concerned with banks? How 'bout the local grocery, don't ya think they might need to keep the ice cream and beer cold? How 'bout the gas stations so you can get to the store to buy ice? Providing you have a pre 1986 300TD. Are they going to have hardened pumps and credit card readers?

Let me give you a clue. EMP was discovered in the '50's. Traffic signals, telephones and the power grid blacked out. The cause was found to be one of the nuclear tests,I don't know which one. The blast was over 1000 miles away. Don't know if you guys were around back then, but electronics was all solid state. When I say solid, I mean solid as in relays, step switches etc. This was fried and it was only a "test". If one of the kooks to the East or West decides he wants to light one of these things in a town near you, you are going to have a bit more to worry about than whether or not your computer is working. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, who ya gonna call? There ain't gonna be no phone lines, no central office, the wireless network will be decimated. Did you ever consider that the ionosphere will be ionized, rendering communications above the MF band impossible?

Guess what? The only thing you and your computer are going to be able to do is play video games, solitaire, and that is if you're one of the unfortunate ones who lived.

You didn't read what I said, JW. I'm on your side, nobody can protect a video game. There's only one thing that needs protection -- power stations. Not the wires, not the substations, not the whole grid, just the ability to generate. We can eventually recover from anything else, just as telegraphy recovered in the 1850's.

We all know that World War IV would be fought with stones, but Mutually Assured Destruction is unlikely nowadays, and a small fission device gift wrapped by Al Qaeda would affect one city. In contrast, an 1850s-type solar EMP event could fry most of our electronics world wide, causing mass starvation, especially in First World countries. This will happen eventually, but it is not that expensive to protect important technology from this sort of wide-spread lower-intensity EMP event.

Well put.