SRC-529

Environmental Assessment for the Satellite Power System (SPS) Concept Development and Evaluation Program (CDEP); DOE/ER-0069; August 1980

Commissioned by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research, Satellite Power System Project Division; Under Contract No. 31-109-ENG-38. 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-1005 The 1980 assessment explains where the 10 milliwatt limit came from: a heating threshold of 100 divided by a safety factor of ten. It also records that the limit had no enforcement teeth, that a new limit based on absorbed power per kilogram was being discussed, and that there was still no public limit at all.
• CLM-1006 In 1980, by the US assessment's figures, the Soviet limit for the general public was two thousand times lower than the American 10 milliwatt guideline. The 1978 American design's fence line was set at a level that would have been legal in Canada or the United States and twenty times over the Soviet public limit the assessment gave.
• CLM-1007 The 1980 assessment worked out that a full American deployment would raise the microwave background everywhere in the country to about twenty times what people were then typically exposed to, though it said the two could not be compared directly because the frequencies differ. It said a risk assessment had to be done before building. No such assessment is held.
• CLM-1008 The 1980 documents give the beam's strength at the satellite, on failure, and above and below the receiving panels. The summary and the detailed report disagree by about twenty times on how much reaches the ground under the panels, which is the number the conclusions about ground animals and plants rest on.
• CLM-1009 The 1980 programme tested bees because of pollination. Early results showed no effect at the beam's strength, and one preliminary report found no effect on bees finding their way home at more than twice the beam's peak. None of this was finished or published at the time.
• CLM-1010 In the US Department of Energy's 1980 assessments the only bird numbers were from quail eggs at a fifth of the beam's peak, which hatched normally with minor blood changes. The assessments described the programme's preliminary bird report as mainly about design and facility building. The idea that flying birds would overheat in the beam was stated as a worry, not a finding.
• CLM-1011 In 1980 the programme used two different rules to translate its low-frequency experiments to the real beam, one for heating and one for the instability. It said the rules were believed sound, and in the same document that the instability rule had never been tested.
• CLM-1012 In the DOE's 1980 summary the Platteville heating tests showed no effect on the navigation and broadcast radio it listed at the beam's equivalent strength (a separate 1980 report on the trials records cross-modulation on time-signal stations and one AM station), warmed the lower ionosphere by roughly the amount theory predicted, but did not produce the density change the same theory predicted. The programme concluded 23 was safe for these systems and said bigger facilities were needed to find the ceiling.
• CLM-1013 By 1980 the programme had made the upper ionosphere ripple with a heater running at what it reckoned was four to twelve times the beam's strength, and seen satellite signals flicker as a result, while a radar looking for the same ripples saw nothing. Whether any of this applied to the real beam depended on a scaling rule nobody had tested.
• CLM-1014 The 1980 programme did the sums on what four hundred heavy launches a year would do to the upper air: a lot more water high up, a big local rise in nitric oxide from re-entries, and an ozone change too small to measure either way. Its own two volumes disagree by five times on the ozone offset from re-entry, and the later one expected the sign to flip.
• CLM-1015 The 1980 assessment expected each big orbit-transfer burn to punch a hole in the upper ionosphere the size of the continental United States, once or twice a month, with smaller daily holes from the launcher, and a permanent thinned ring around the launch latitude. It could not say what that would add up to.
• CLM-1016 The 1980 programme expected heavy launches to change local weather in small ways, to produce a ground cloud like a dirty coal plant's for a short time, and to make thin high clouds, and it labelled nearly all of its own results tentative.

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