SPS Hearings, 94th Congress January 1976

Dr. Greenblat. And he refused, Dr. Glaser refused. [Laughter.] Senator Ford. I am glad vou have that kind of confidence. Let me ask another question or two and then maybe counsel will have a question he would like to ask. You did not include the relative social and environmental impacts in vour analvsis, I believe. What are these impacts? Can you say which option would tend to be favored if you did include these impacts— satellites or terrestrial? Dr. Greenblat. Well, I will—you have heard from Dr. Glaser Peter, would vou like to cover----- Dr. Glaser. I have talked about them. Dr. Greenblat. The concerns about nuclear systems are well known. I need not elaborate on these. Let me sav the following. I did mention one of the problem areas, or the areas to be studied, included environmental issues. Let me read from the list that we have identified so that you will know in further detail our thinking about these issues. We would suggest that you need to quantifv the impact of land management factors. The receiving antenna will be a large structure— or system, I should sav—on the Earth, as will be the launch complex— you will have manv flights to put up the satellite, however it may be done. The question of resource extraction and manufacture has to be considered. There are questions of safetv standards and issues of the power densitv of the satellite, or the power, rather, emanating from the satellite. Now, we have ground-ruled it to be at a level which, according to todav's understanding, is at or below the threshold where there mav be changes in the ionosphere. OK, so we have keot our power densitv at or below this level, although we do not know what will happen if vou exceed this level. It is just a question of change and we don't even know what the impact of that change may be—it may be good, we just don't know. We have looked at—there will be problems of communications interference, of the problems of the waste heat which will be generated at the receiving station. There are problems of the safetv and control of the beam—and that has to be studied. The materials that you use for the photovoltaic system need not be silicon—there are other materials which would seem to be interesting. However, there could be safety issues associa- ated with them. There are questions, again, of ionospheric modification that we would have to studv, and other issues. Although one would have to sav terrestrial systems should be subjected to an equivalent kind of analvsis. Again, I won't speculate about nuclear svstems and other types of svstems. Senator Ford. Well, let me just sav this—isn't this concept rela- tivelv clean? And if vou included the relative social and environmental impacts wouldn't it make satellite solar power svstems look good? Dr. Greenblat. Yes. That is our belief as of this point—yes, very much so. Dr. Heiss. One never knows these days.

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