SRC-535

Environmental Assessment for the Satellite Power System-Concept Development and Evaluation Program-Atmospheric Effects; DOE/ER-0090; November 1980

Commissioned by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research, Solar Power Satellite Projects 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-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-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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