Unfortunately there is no magic shielding that can stop all kinds of radiation in the same way. Only heavy materials like lead or concrete walls can stop high energy photons in a short distance.

Our atmosphere protects us from cosmic rays, but it is many miles thick.

The short answer is EM radiation CANT do anything to mitigate high energy charged particles in field free space.

A free unbound electron cannot absorb a photon, but electrons orbiting in a magnetic field can.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjrmbSfqoTUAhVDf5AKHc-7APwQFggmMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bnl.gov%2Fatf%2FMeetings%2FUserMtg%2Faccelerator.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGuqzUkRnhZB0FUmZzP2x2mw65GgA&cad=rja

What is happening here is that the VLF is interacting with the particles trapped in the earths magnetic field– it is not eliminating the radiation belt, it is just changing it’s location (at least that is the speculation).

Without the magnetic field there would be no such effect- so it wouldn’t work on the moon. It would only help spacecraft near the radiation belts in the magnetic field of a body like earth…

Places like the moon or the asteroid belt would be ideal to dump hazardous wastes, or build things that might accidentally go boom–providing that location already wasn’t devoted to some important and productive human settlement or industry. But worlds where we had colonies or research facilities should be off limits.

The one exception that comes to mind is places that might harbor life, or fossil evidence of ancient life, such as Mars, Europa, Enceladus and so on. Another, non-terrestrial life form would be so scientifically important and of such enormous potential practical value that it would be a crime to threaten it, or the facilities studying it, with a waste dump or a toxic factory, or some planetary engineering scheme that wasn’t thoroughly thought out. Fortunately, there’s a lot of real estate up there that could probably be sacrificed, if a thorough survey showed it might not have potential for future human settlement or development.

As for protecting individual facilities or spacecraft, I don’t think this kind of scheme would work. Earth protects us from radiation with natural physical barriers created by our planet itself. Maybe we can enhance or control these natural barriers with clever technology, but generating protection from say, cosmic rays, for one ship or base seems highly unlikely. Some radiation can only be stopped by lots of matter between you and the source.

Shielding is heavy. I suspect even most temporary habitats on most solar system bodies will have to be located underground. And some places are so “hot” we wouldn’t even have the time to dig a hole after we got there. Even long missions to nearby places like Mars will be dangerous. Long travel times and waiting months for planets to line up for the return trip will expose crews to very long accumulated doses of radiation. We might be able to counteract the negative effects of zero-g with diet, drugs and exercise, but having ionizing radiation plowing through your tissues and wrecking cell chemistry is something else again.

Nobody in the space enthusiast community likes to dwell on this, but unless we can develop faster means of transport, space travel may be a lot more dangerous than we think. Crews may be limited to one mission per lifetime, or be forced to accept lifetime assignments to protected habitats because the return voyage is too toxic. Some of these problems can probably be mitigated, but I doubt they will all go away or be amenable to clever technological solutions.

What about smaller scale applications providing radiation protection for spacecraft?

In a century or so this could be a pretty noisy solar system.

“A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth,” said Phil Erickson, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, Massachusetts.

VLF signals are transmitted from ground stations at huge powers to communicate with submarines deep in the ocean. While these waves are intended for communications below the surface, they also extend out beyond our atmosphere, shrouding Earth in a VLF bubble. This bubble is even seen by spacecraft high above Earth’s surface, such as NASA’s Van Allen Probes, which study electrons and ions in the near-Earth environment.

The probes have noticed an interesting coincidence — the outward extent of the VLF bubble corresponds almost exactly to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts, a layer of charged particles held in place by Earth’s magnetic fields. Dan Baker, director of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, coined this lower limit the “impenetrable barrier” and speculates that if there were no human VLF transmissions, the boundary would likely stretch closer to Earth. Indeed, comparisons of the modern extent of the radiation belts from Van Allen Probe data show the inner boundary to be much farther away than its recorded position in satellite data from the 1960s, when VLF transmissions were more limited.

With further study, VLF transmissions may serve as a way to remove excess radiation from the near-Earth environment. Plans are already underway to test VLF transmissions in the upper atmosphere to see if they could remove excess charged particles — which can appear during periods of intense space weather, such as when the sun erupts with giant clouds of particles and energy.

The original paper is here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-017-0357-5
but will cost $39.95 unless you have a subscription…

I scanned the paper- the bulk of the paper talks about the impact of High altitude nuclear testing on space weather and EMP effects on the ground. Section 8 talks about the VLF interactions with space weather – and lays out the observations of that effect… its not clear that they are really claiming that current VLF emissions ARE significantly modifying the location of the Van Allen belt- just that they could and further study is being conducted. SOME effect is observed but it isnt conclusively proven the existing VLF emissions are pushing the belts out.
One interesting quote from the paper:

For example, the US Air Force DSX satellite scheduled for a 2017 launch will carry an onboard VLF transmitter for in-situ attempts to initiate radiation belt remediation mechanisms

Publicly available paper on this satellite is here:
lws-set.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/dsx_paper.pdf

Wave Particle Interaction Experiment:
Researching the physics of very low-frequency
(VLF) transmissions in the magnetosphere and
characterizing the feasibility of natural and
man-made VLF waves to reduce space
radiation;

I read about the ‘metal needles’ you talk about when I worked at MIT-Lincoln Lab, (They did that project-called West Ford)you can find more on that here:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0ahUKEwjR6o-l0_rTAhXIVyYKHUOFCHcQFggsMAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ll.mit.edu%2Fpublications%2Flabnotes%2FLooking_Back_3.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGUnRpaVaOxaIMKvxpgcYedH_UUOw&cad=rja
and here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
Some are still up there…

Did it ever occur to these idiots that life on earth evolved to live in this radiation environment, and that anything that might alter it is potentially deadly? Present radiation levels may even have beneficial effects we are not even aware of. And anything we do to modify it runs the risk of altering it permanently, maybe for the worst.

VLF radio communications with submerged submarines has always been a wet dream for the masters of war, but this is ridiculous. For what may be an illusory and temporary military advantage, these idiots are willing to engage in a technology that may affect the ionosphere and Van Allen belts?

This is irresponsible lunacy. I don’t believe it is a certainty this particular scheme will work as promised; it may just be Pentagon propaganda to prepare the nation psychologically for these systems, which have already come under attack by eco-freaks (probably for all the wrong reasons). But I wouldn’t put it past them. I heard about the dumping of tiny metal needles into LEO. And during the Vietnam era, there was actually a scheme under consideration to spread phosphorus aerosols into space, which would absorb sunlight during the day and glow at night, providing the equivalent of bright moonlight so we could hunt down the Viet Cong more effectively. I guess the astronomer’s lobby put an end to that one. The point is, we don’t know what the effects of these interventions will be. Even if nothing comes of it, we cannot risk that something might.

I would imagine most of these geo-engineering schemes (Terraforming for Dummies) simply wouldn’t work, but the very idea that they might is scary. That they are even being considered is terrifying. For the remote possibility of a minor military advantage, these imbeciles are ready to embark on irreversible interventions into the environment, setting into motion processes with unpredictable, and possibly catastrophic results.

If this technology can be employed to make habitable other worlds, such as satellites of the outer planets, I’m all for it (after we determine there is no other life there that might be negatively affected). It is worth a try, especially if the radiation environment there is already deadly to all life. If anything goes wrong, these places are just uninhabitable lumps of ice and slag bathed in deadly radiation anyway, and we’re not going to make them any worse. No one gets hurt if it doesn’t work, or even if we totally misjudge the results and completely wreck the place.

But not on earth, not our protection against solar and cosmic radiation. Please tell me this reporter is just blowing smoke out his ass. Please say it ain’t so.

If there is anything environmental science has taught us in the last few decades is that everything on this planet is connected. The world has some ability to absorb perturbations and shocks and heal itself, but we don’t know how or how much. Look at what happened when we accidentally and inadvertently doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the course of a century or two.

You just don’t fuck with the Van Allen belts.