SRC-500

Preliminary Environmental Assessment for the Satellite Power System (SPS), Volume 1, Executive Summary; DOE/ER-0021/1 (Vol. 1 of 2); October 1978

Commissioned by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research, Satellite Power System Project Office; no contract number printed. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-1165 In 1978 the government said plainly what it did not know about a space power station's effects: almost nothing about long, low-level microwave exposure of people, almost nothing about birds in the beam and nothing about whole ecosystems, and no numbers yet for anything else; it gave itself two years to find out.
• CLM-1166 An early tally of ordinary industrial harm from building the system: about twenty-five million lost working days from injuries over thirty years, more than half of them in mining the materials, and a materials bill that would take a large slice of a year's national output of mercury, argon, hydrogen and oxygen.
• CLM-1167 For the launches the 1978 assessment could only line up the rulebook - allowed minutes of rocket exhaust gases for the public, the EPA's day and night noise levels, the blast reach of a launcher twice as explosive as a Saturn V - and note that several launches a day would probably break the noise rule.
• CLM-1168 In 1978 the receiving station was expected to warm its surroundings about as much as a suburb does, unless the beam went astray; one Skylab launch had already punched a 2,000 km hole in the ionosphere for hours, and only preliminary calculations existed for what daily launches would do; water dumped above 40 km was the open climate question.

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