POWER July 2013 - 52

ASSET MANAGEMENT
far beyond what the scientists had calculated,
driving their instruments off scale.
The explosion caused damage as far away
as Hawaii, some 900 miles to the east,
where it blew out streetlights, set off burglar
alarms, and fried a telephone company
microwave repeater.
Subsequent atmospheric tests-Bluegill
Triple Prime and Kingfish-further established
the unexpected EMP effects, including
disrupting the Telstar communications
satellite, alerting researchers to the new
phenomenon. But EMP remained a largely
classified topic for the next 20 years. In
1982, facing a series of challenges on how
to base the next generation of strategic ballistic
missiles, the MX missile, the Reagan
administration began lifting the veil of secrecy
around EMP effects. The president
(with Executive Order 12400) appointed a
panel under the direction of General Brent
Scrowcroft to examine issues related to siting
the missiles. Among those was the effect
of EMP on missile communications.
The Scowcroft Commission concluded
that the U.S. missile program was adequately
hardened against EMP effects, and the
issue largely disappeared from view for another
few years. Over the years, the military
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars
hardening its own infrastructure against an
EMP attack.
The problem is the civilian grid (upon
which the military also depends for more
than 90% of its operations). In 1989, a solar
storm caused widespread disruptions
in the Northeast, raising the issue graphically,
both in terms of solar storms and
an intentional attack. Congress got interested
in the issue, and in 2001 established
a commission to examine the threat of
EMPs. In 2004 that commission concluded,
" Our vulnerability is increasing daily
as our use of and dependence on electronics
continues to grow. The impact of
EMP is asymmetric in relation to potential
protagonists who are not as dependent on
modern electronics.
" The current vulnerability of our critical
infrastructures can both invite and reward attack
if not corrected. Correction is feasible
and well within the Nation's means and resources
to accomplish. "
As is often the case with special governmental
commissions, nothing came of the
2004 report. In the meantime, an enormous
blackout that struck most of the Northeast
in 2003 reignited concern about the vulnerability
of the U.S. grid. Congress reestablished
the EMP commission (www
.empcommission.org), which issued another
report in 2008, calling for national action
to address the threat of disruption to criti52
cal
U.S. infrastructure. The chairman, William
Graham, testified to Congress in April
2008, " vulnerability to EMP that gives rise
to potentially large-scale, long-term consequences
can be reasonably reduced below
the level of a potentially catastrophic national
problem by coordinated and focused
effort between the private and public sectors
of our country. The cost for such improved
security in the next 3 to 5 years is modest by
any standard-and extremely so in relation
to both the war on terror and the value of the
national infrastructures threatened. "
Graham's commission estimated the
cost of hardening the grid and other critical
infrastructure at $10 billion to $20 billion
over 20 years. Mitigation involves,
among other tasks, developing backup capability
for grounded transformers, which
would be among the most significant
components of the grid to be damaged by
an EMP attack. This would also protect
against the effects of a large-scale solar
storm hitting the grid.
Again, to date, nothing has been done.
Think Globally, Act Locally?
Peter Pry cries out for a national response,
calling for a presidential executive order,
which the EMP commission has drafted, " to
protect the national electric grid and other
critical infrastructures from an EMP attack. "
The lack of a federal government response,
despite what he believes is the clear
nature of the threat, led Michael Maloof to
title his book A Nation Forsaken. He told
POWER, " The federal government isn't going
to do anything. " The feds, Maloof argues,
are so paralyzed by partisan divisions and
fights over spending cuts that a fully national
response won't work.
The federal government, he says, " never
takes preventative action. " He gives Congress
credit for creating the two EMP commissions
but adds, they " then ignored them. The federal
government has failed, and so the nation
is behind the curve. The Department of
Homeland Security should be taking the lead
on this, but isn't. "
So Maloof says he's been traveling to U.S.
states to encourage state and local responses.
" This is a new states' rights issue, " he says.
" People can take action at the state level. I'm
traveling around suggesting people get together
with their local emergency response
agencies and coordinators " to plan for an
EMP contingency.
Despite legislative failures in the past,
Franks and his 13-member bipartisan caucus
hope to move EMP legislation in the
113th Congress. " Two years ago, " he said,
" we got the Grid Act passed unanimously
in the House. " But it failed to pass in the
www.powermag.com
Senate, largely because of concerns about
the inclusion in the House bill of provisions
related to cybersecurity. Now he's
preparing legislation that will separate out
cybersecurity from the EMP issue. " It's not
that we don't take cybersecurity seriously, "
he said. " An EMP event would be the ultimate
in a cybersecurity catastrophe. " But
as a practical matter, the cyber threat has to
get dealt with on its own.
There is also an artifact of the evolution
of the U.S. electric grid that may also
help the country survive an EMP attack,
whether a result of solar storms or an angry
North Korean dictator. Because there
is no national grid, but three separate,
loosely interconnected systems, an EMP
event likely would lead to islanding and
isolating the grids.
Indeed, inside the three major grids-
the Eastern and the Western interconnections
and the Electric Reliability Council
of Texas-the interconnections are weak
enough that islanding will also occur. For
many policy experts who have worked
on grid issues for years, eliminating islanding
is a goal, because it defeats the
concept of economic power dispatch. But
Ben McConnell, a retired Oak Ridge National
Laboratory scientist, told a Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission meeting
last year, " One of the best ways to protect
the grid is to go into islanding mode. "
(See " The Electric Grid: A Civilization's
Achilles Heel? " in the January 2013 issue
of POWER.)
Ultimately, the federal government may
be helping to develop a response to EMP.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's
Idaho National Laboratory (INL)
are working on ways to increase the resilience
of the electric grid. In a briefing paper,
INL scientists Craig Rieger and Ray
Grosshans describe how they are working
on " resilient control system technologies
that adapt and transform in real time to
both failures and attacks. Truly resilient
systems intelligently route around broken
system components to avoid cascading
failures. Resilient systems draw on reserve
resources to sustain life-safety systems.
And resilient systems focus human
attention on the problems machines either
can't or shouldn't solve alone.
" The development of such technologies
will underpin next-generation designs for
critical infrastructure, including chemical
plants, refineries, nuclear facilities and defense
systems, the failure of which causes
even greater risk than the loss of use. " ■
-Kennedy Maize is executive editor
of MANAGING POWER and a POWER
contributing editor.
POWER | July 2013
http://www.empcommission.org http://www.powermag.com
POWER July 2013

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