Lunar Solar Power System

--- Free Trader wrote:

> Seriously, my purpose in pointing out the Environment
> News Service (ENS) article was simply to show where
> space solar power is being talked about. I was rather
> surprised by the tone of the article on the ENS site
> because (in my experience) ENS tends to be very
> "green" and anti-power. For example, I seem to recall
> an article on ENS a while back that complained about
> birds being killed/maimed by the spinning blades of
> wind turbines (??!!!!). The fact that ENS didn't yelp
> about birds being cooked in flight by microwaves
> beamed to Earth was a shocker!

There have been quite extensive studies carried out by the US EPA on that issue
which basically found that the microwaves from SPS won't be a danger to
wildlife. The beam is much too low in density to cook anything, birds might
get warmed up and in fact in some experiments small birds were actually going
to where there were microwaves being fired in preference to where there were
none when the whether was cold because the microwaves warmed them up slightly.
I wouldn't expect it to cause any problems for wildlife.

Have a look at http://www.permanent.com/p-sps.htm if you haven't already seen
it for the information.