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As if a combined earthquake and tsunami were not enough to command the attention of the world’s nuclear power authorities, a new report says they should be adding solar storms to the list of natural hazard risks that have the potential to trigger nuclear reactor failures.

Just six months ago, the first two of this trifecta of hazards inflicted massive damage on northeastern Japan’s nuclear power plants (not to mention a wide swath of the region’s communities, farms and businesses). Now, the International Business Times reports that severe solar storm activity could “induce geomagnetic currents that could destroy a substantial fraction of the very largest transformers on the power grid,” knocking out electric power “for a period of years and possibly decades.”

“Last month,” IBT writes, “the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours.” Any longer-lasting electrical power outage obviously would increase the risk of a meltdown. The article also pointed to a recent report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which “discloses that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity provides a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss. This is a risk far greater than most other natural disasters, including major earthquakes and tsunamis.”

The issue of solar flares is not new one, but it came into focus again after a surge of geomagnetic activity reported last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Our friends at the All Hazards blog reported that at one point, “the Kp index (a measure of the amount of geomagnetic disturbance…) hit ‘8’ which is pretty impressive.” (See graph at right, courtesy of NOAA.) As for the impact of such activity, it noted that a widespread outage of even a few days “could cause some big problems for nuclear power plants. Such a long-term power outage really needs to be on our preparedness radar – both for individuals (e.g., by keeping a rolling food store) and for emergency managers.”

For further reading on space weather and its impact on the planet, check out the two-part series that ran in March of this year in The Washington Post (Part 1 here and Part 2 [which addresses the impact on nuclear power] here). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published an eight-page paper in May entitled “Solar Storms Effects on Nuclear and Electrical Installations.” And in February, All Hazards published its own “Quick Guide to Space Weather and Solar Flares.”

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