Liam Fox warns of 'threat' from solar flares
Updated on 20 September 2010
Defence Secretary Liam Fox highlights the vulnerability of our national infrastructure from huge explosions of energy from the sun which could crash electricity grids and paralyse the earth. Avi Schnurr explains the science behind solar flares.
Scientists have warned that the once-in-a-century phenomenon of a large solar flare is overdue.
Such a burst of magnetic energy erupting in the sun's atmosphere could cause intense radiation storms which, in turn, would wreak havoc including causing widespread power blackouts around the globe.
Former US government advisor Avi Schnurr has suggested that super-flares occur once every hundred years.
While the last major flare in the mid-nineteenth century disrupted the early telegraph system, a similar event now could disable modern life, with computers, telephones, water and food supplies affected.
Earlier this year, NASA predicted that a storm could be provoked by a peak in the sun's energy cycle around 2013, leaving Britain without crucial communication signals for extended periods of time.
Speaking to Channel 4 News Mr Schnurr, president of the EIS Council, said a solar flare could cause a permanent blackout across the world.
"The most severe affects would be destruction of big transformers that make it possible to send all the electrical power through the electric grid," he said.
"It would mean a blackout and potentially a blackout that would just go on and on. A permanent blackout. No electrical power.
"We've seen it happen before. NASA just published a study completed this last summer which they found this has happened about every 150-100 years.
"The last time was 150 years ago. The telegraph network at that point was international in scope and it was fried, it was destroyed, all over the earth."
Mr Schnurr said governments needed to realise the threat and come together to protect electric grids.
"There are fairly simple measures which can be taken," he said.
"There are the equivalent of huge surge protectors which need to be put on these different transformers. The cost is fairly nominal. For the UK we're talking somewhere around a few 100s of millions of pounds. In the US it would be probably between one and three billion dollars."
Understanding a solar flare
Mr Schnurr told Channel 4 News a solar flare was the sun's version of massive storms on earth.
"On the surface of the sun there are actually small solar flares occurring constantly," he said.
"Think of the sun as a cauldron of nuclear fire. Some of this fire is always bubbling up to the surface, spewing out toward space. Just like on earth sometimes there are hurricanes, sometimes on the sun these become enormous.
"Some of the "nuclear fire" spews out toward the earth it slams in to the earth's magnetic field, it pumps an enormous amount of energy into that field. That gets sucked into the electric grid, runs through the ground up into the big transformers and fries them."
Dr Fox earlier pointed out how modern societies' reliance on technology increases their vulnerability to such events.
"As the nature of our technology becomes more complex, so the threat becomes more widespread" he said at a Westminster conference hosted by the Electric Infrastructure Security Council and the Henry Jackson think-tank.
"While we all benefit from the products of scientific advances so we also create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by our enemies."
Scientists have warned the damage inflicted by a natural solar storm could be replicated by the explosion of a nuclear weapon in space by a hostile power.
Identifying weaknesses in Britain's defences to that kind of high-tech threat is one element of the coalition government's ongoing Strategic Defence and Security Review.
The Defence Secretary is currently battling to limit coming spending cuts to his budget and speculation of a delay to the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent.
