SRC-557

Compilation and Assessment of Microwave Bioeffects: A Selective Review of the Literature on Biological Effects of Microwaves in Relation to the Satellite Power System, Final Report -- PNL-2634; report A0-02-0l/EA81028; May 1978

Commissioned by U.S. Department of Energy, Division of Solar Energy, Contract EY-76-C-06-1830. 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-1154 In 1978 the literature said the fence-line level was well below anything known to cause disease over the short term, that no study had come anywhere near thirty years of exposure, and that there was no data at all on what happens to a bird that flies through the beam.
• CLM-1155 The 1978 reviewers did the sum for a small bird flying four kilometres through the beam centre and concluded it would probably die of heat, on rat data and the physics of a bird the size of half a wavelength; nobody had flown a bird through a continuous beam to find out.
• CLM-1156 The one worrying result at the fence-line level in 1978 was thinner eggshells in hens kept twelve weeks in a metal cage whose field strength was calculated rather than measured; the reviewers kept the worry because animals living near a rectenna would also be in reflected, uneven fields.
• CLM-1157 The reviewers said most of the older microwave-health literature could not be trusted on how much power the animals actually got, that pulsed beams do more than steady ones at the same average, and that nobody had ever tried to assess an ecosystem.

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