When Technology Fails, 400 Chernobyls, Super Solar Storms & EMPs

Apr 19, 2012

Author, engineer, designer, and green builder, Mat Stein was born and raised in Burlington Vermont. He graduated from MIT in 1978 with a major in Mechanical Engineering. Mat has built hurricane and earthquake resistant, energy efficient, environmentally friendly homes. He has also designed consumer water filtration devices, solar PV roofing panels, medical bacteriological filters, emergency chemical drench systems, computer disk drives, and portable fiberglass buildings. Today, Mat owns and operates Stein Design and Construction, providing product design services, engineering analysis, and green building. He joins us to discuss six major trends he calls, "civilization busters."If these trends don't change soon, it may well be the perfect storm. We'll also talk about shifting to sustainability, the free market, consumer's responsibility and government regulation. In hour two, we discuss game changing events such as nuclear disasters, EMPs, and solar storms. We're due for a solar maximum at the end of 2012. If a super solar storm event occurs, what can we expect and how should we prepare? Mat tells us how society's technology would be affected and mentions new technologies that can protect our transformers from a solar storm. Mat details the potential problems that could happen at nuclear plants surrounding sudden disaster. Then, we'll discuss EMPs and the impact on our infrastructures. Stein mentions an interesting EMP-optimized weapon developed by Russia and China. Later, we talk about what happens to the nuclear waste after we've made the shift into cleaner technologies.