Reader resistant sends in an update to our confabulation a month back on the odds* of violent space weather destroying power grids pandemic during the upcoming solar cycle. Wired is running an audience with Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific hearing into Civilization's End," and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech. The piece brings two new threads to the discussion: the latterly discovered residence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, magnifying our vulnerability, and manageable steps we can take over the next few years to make the power grid more robust against solar flares and coronal mass ejections. There's also that whole Mayan 2012 thing. Quoting John Kapperman: "What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground connections. The addition of that little bit of recalcitration would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid. In its simplest form, it's article that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine. ...we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for allowance for a transformer. [In the US] there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. ... We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things."

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