Patrick Geryl is an author living in Belgium, best known in the United States for books with titles like The World Cataclysm in 2012, How To Survive 2012, and The Orion Prophecy. In his native country his oeuvre extends beyond astronomy, cosmology, and Mayan history, to fruit-only diets. Geryl’s conception of the 2012 meme is pretty indicative of what you find among the more extreme end-of-the-world survivalists.

Geryl is convinced that a solar superstorm is coming that will shower the Earth with magnetism, overloading the electrical grid in the same way that the 1859 solar storm caused widespread failure of telegraphs — in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. In the modern age, electricity and electronics are what is holding our civilization together (imagine what would happen if your city’s supermarkets lost all of their refrigerators, all at once). That isn’t even the worst of it, he says. With widespread grid failure will come widespread nuclear power plant meltdowns.

As Geryl explains, all the safety subsystems in a nuclear power plant are powered by the plant itself. What happens if the plant shuts down? It uses power from the grid (there isn’t a huge distinction between on-site and off-site power, it’s all part of the same continuum). If grid power isn’t available, power is supplied by kerosene generators. If the generators fail — as happened in the case of the Fukushima I plant — meltdown occurs. As one of the articles he sent me stated, "every nuclear power plant operates in a near-meltdown state."

Except, of course, this isn’t true. As Kenneth D. Bergeron, PhD, nuclear safety expert, author of Tritium on Ice, and a 25 year veteran of Sandia National Laboratories, explains, if you accept that the entire electrical grid could be destroyed, and remain that way for a considerable length of time, then "nuclear power plants could end up without coolant circulation, but this would be many weeks or months after scram [emergency shutdown]." There could be overheating of the core, but there wouldn’t be a China Syndrome-style meltdown. Any radioactivity released would be small and local and the consequences would be small, especially when compared to whatever "hypothesized calamity" took out the grid in the first place! In other words, if Geryl’s version of 2012 were to happen, we’d have bigger problems than some nuclear power plants shutting down.

According to Geryl, Europe and the United States — with their high concentration of nuclear power plants — will be completely uninhabitable once 2012 arrives. Africa, he says, is where he will make his escape, assuming he and his small survival group can build a structure. "Everybody has to go [to Africa]," he told me, "there is no survival option possible in United States. In South America, there is a possibility, but there are lots of volcanoes on the mountains, and the earth quake activity will be very high, so survival is very low. In Belgium," he adds, "you can't survive."

Compared to Geryl, most 2012 fanboys are positively level-headed. What if the economy collapses and you can’t depend on the police to keep you safe? What would happen if there was a natural disaster, and you couldn’t rely on government agencies or non-governmental relief? Luckily, there are a few entrepreneurs out there offering turnkey survival solutions. Not that you or I could afford them.