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Planned Constuction of Orbiting Microwave Power Station
Fith writes "A small news item tells of a research project to build robots that will assemble and repair a gigantic orbiting solar collector. You'll have to scroll down a bit to find the section. Basically, power collected will be beamed back to earth using 'safe levels' of microwave energy. " This is a proposal that's been floating around for quite some time-vast LEO or HEO solar panel arrays, beaming the power down to earth. For those of you who played, Simcity2000, this was one of the power options as well. NASA hopes to part of this operational by 2015.
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Science FUD.
Your fears of "what if it makes a **super** bacteria" are, and I am not exagerating, exactly as likely as saying "exposure to twinkies will cause a **super** bacteria to mutate".
Here's Why:
1) Anything which causes chemical damage to DNA is technicaly a "mutagen".
2) Almost everything is a "mutagen". (well, thats an exageration, but lots and lots and lots of stuff is a mutagen).
3) Because of this, everything (especialy things with **short** life cycles like bacteria) is constantly mutating.
4) The vast majority (read 999,999 out of 1,000,000) of mutations are **HARMFUL** to the life form. (Imagine, what is the likelyhood that smacking my computer with a hammer will make it work **better**?)
5) Air Bourne Bacteria is almost always in spore form (low water contenet, almost no chemical activity), and damage to bacterial spores makes it rather hard for them to reinstate, but thats okay for the bacteria, because they produce so MANY spores.
6) Evolution is pushed by small changes, (ie. many little benificial mutations **in**a**row**) so to get a **super**bacteria** from a radiation stream, you would basicaly be asking the hammer that you just hit your desktop computer with to produce a Cray out of the ruble.
Remember boys and girls, evolution needs TWO things, a mutation source, and a selector (this one survives better than that one AND has more kids), and randomly blasting out radiation WILL increase the rate of mutation, but it wont DIRECT it. This is why we dont have flying cats, despit all the fun chemical mutagens that we expose ourselves and our pets to every single day. (like caffine) and all the fun energy ones weve been exposed to for ages (UV radiation, physical stress (like being slapped), strong temperature gradients, etc.)
But for anyone who doesn't believe me, go get your Junior Quack Scientist Memebership Card(tm) and go off and study ball lightning and bigfoot.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
After all, first we generated power by burning wood, oil, coal and gas. So they came along and said this was polluting the environment, causing acid rain and global warming. We start building nuclear power plants but they don't like that either -- though I never quite figured out the arguments against it.
This is certainly going to flip their lids; all they need to see are words like "microwave" and "radiation" and they'll be off their trolleys.
Makes you wonder where they think the juice should come from. Or would they be happy to go back to living in mud huts?
This is an interesting question to me. Also think of planes(they would be easier to control though). Hopefully NASA is well on their way to solving the dispersion problem, but the problem of things overhead seems like it would be very difficult to solve.
Hmm, I admit that I'm no expert here. Fusion probably isn't quite as perfect as I made it out to be, and still might exhibit some radiation leakage.
I suspect that the reason that there is no commercial plant in the works is that it is *extremely* expensive (in dollars) to get an energy profit from a fusion reaction. Fusion reactions aren't very sustainable, or very efficient, at the current state of the art. They do turn a slight energy profit in pulses, though.
However, fusion research seems a lot more promising than space-based microwave power. Fusion is also (in principle) *far* cleaner and more efficient than fission. However, it is still a heinously underfunded avenue of research (so it seems to me), relative to its potential eventual payoff.
Of course, I am indeed hand-waving without any actual numbers in front of me; however I *believe* that the last set of grants in this area only amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Even if the real number is an order of magnitude higher than that, it still seems to be an order of magnitude too low. A billion or two here would be well worth it, especially considering all the other places we're spending money these days. What I'm talking about here, in terms of a research goal, is the difference between waiting 20 years and waiting 50 years for the first commercial fusion power plant. At any rate, IMHO fusion is still a better investment than microwave power.
Airplanes have windows.
Bye bye.
I used to work for them, they kick ass. The Space Studies Institute!
Seriously, why not use the structure as an antenna?
Plus, it'll be out of the atmosphere, miles away from human RF interference and with the atmosphere between most of the noise and the antenna, and in a high orbit above the other satellites.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but this seems like it should be possible.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Yes it did have to do with orbiting power stations, although that wasn't the focus. Re-read the end of the story.
One thing I don't understand, instead of sending man to the moon, why not just sent bunch of sattelite dishes onto the moon surface, and create a large observatory complex.
bet it will be so much cheaper, after all, antenna is not expensive or hard to make.
I hate gee whiz expensive project that doesn't give us anything.
make radio observatory complex on the moon. This will give us so much advantage, interplanetary engineering practice, increase observation time, and all this for the cost of large budgetted movie, or a super expensive space orbital telescope.
What's that? Got any links?
-- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
This is definitely true with corn, which at harvest contains a significantly higher concentration of Carbon 13 than the surrounding environment (plants, soil and air). Carbon 13 is non-radioactive and harmless, but makes up only about 1% of naturally occurring carbon (the rest is ~98.9% Carbon 12, and then there's a smattering of C14 which is used in carbon dating). The corn plants actually favor using the C13 in their chemical processes and end up with much greater than the natural 1% concentration.
People who eat a lot of corn, therefore have a higher C13 concentration in their bodies, and are isotopically heavier than those with a low-corn diet. Might lead to an interesting weight loss program!
Either way, other plants also favor different isotopes of elements, so it wouldn't be surprising to see plants that contained higher concentrations of Potassium 40 (natural radioactive potassium), radioactive phosphorus, and other naturally occurring radioactive elements.
Ever pointed a geiger counter at an open container of salt substitute (KCl - potassium chloride, instead of normal salt NaCl - sodium chloride)? It goes nuts! Lots of happy "natural" radiation right there.
-Tec -who used to work in a medical lab with C14, H3, and other paranoia inducing materials...
------------------
got a tiger in my tank. fish very unhappy.
>Well fortunately for us, earths atmosphere blocks some of the most energetic radiation from reaching the earth. This keeps us alive but you'll collect far more energy by getting into the upper atmosphere or above it entirely.
True. But how much energy will you lose when you transmit the beam back through the atmosphere?
You must live in a densely populated area. Here in southern Nevada, 95+% of the state is uninhabited. Just wide open desert with lots and lots and lots of sun. Now in Seattle (where the sun is only a rumor), space based power might look better.
It might be feasible to outfit the windows with a nearly transparent, fine wire mesh to prevent them from acting as cavity radiators to the passengers and crew.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Thousands of years? Nahh. Just keep it till its cheaper to lob the stuff into the nearest star than it is to store it properly. I'd give it a couple centuries, tops.
--Mark
More NASA vapourware. BFD.
NASA's job is to spend funding on studies that they can hype to Congress to get them more funding. Every once in a while they follow through on a project if the right congresscritters get some pork out of it, but of course the engineering (and science, if any) suffers for it.
Solar cells pull 75W/m^2 and harness the proven energy of the sun. Side effects include sunburn.
>You end up using a lot less material when manufacturing the collecting elements. As someone noted here already, there's lots of debris floating around up there, and it's moving pretty fast. Armouring against this stuff is impossible, so why bother at all?
For one thing, the microwave transmitting equipment probably doesn't like having holes punched in it by space debris. Also, imagine the nice ring the earth would have from chunks of this huge structure flying off all the time!
The Canadian built CANDU reactor is another story however. As a heavy water reactor, neutrons are slowed to a point where the U-238 (the most abundant Uranium, especially since CANDU's use straight ore for fuel) is converted to Pt-239 through a short and fun nuclear reaction.
Thanks to this reaction, CANDU reactors have a very high Plutonium output. Which I imagine the Canadian government exploited by selling the spent fuel rods (with all that nice Pt) to the states.
This also explains how countries like India now have an ample supply of nuclear weapons. We sold 'em CANDU reactors.
The lesson to be learned? Canucks are smart. We got electricity AND got to sell that pesky nuclear waste to the bombmakers. (I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic, sorry)
I thought Las Vegas was like that already.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
> As to your "super bacteria" resistant strains of bacteria crop up all the time, but its not due to radiation in any way. The more we use antibiotics, the more bacteria is exposed to them, which then evolve to be resistant.
There was a really good article in Discover Magazine about a year ago about this. It was really interesting. I no longer use antibiotic products around the house.
I for one am looking forward to the day when the Price-Anderson Act can be repealed here in the United States. This was an act of Congress that eliminated liability for the results of a nuclear accident. It seems that when they were trying to get all those plutonium-producing power plants into production (so much for the "peaceful atom") the actuaries just wouldn't buy into the plan, so utilities interested in building nuclear power plants could not be found. An act of Congress was necessary, to counter "market forces" (always popular with the people who say there is a natural evolution toward Nuclear technology because of cost) that prevented the emergence of the Nuclear Power industry.
Eliminate the Price-Anderson Act, and the civillian Nuclear Energy system would be shut down by the beancounters.
(Trusting Sim City to be technologically accurate is like trusting Louis Freeh on cryptography.)
This proposal would convert light into electricity into microwaves back into electricity, with power loss occuring at each step.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just put mirrors in orbit focused on a ground based solar array, or even a biomass farm? The mirrors would be cheaper, lighter, and less maintainence, and as new photovoltaic technology comes along the ground based equipment would be easier to upgrade.
Of course, you would have to limit the intensity 2 or 3 x of normal daylight levels. Ask any ant what a focused light beam can do.
Wrong kind of radiation, dude. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
IF you collided enourmous amounts of electrons together it would create huge amounts of heat and then the super conductor would give way and spit out about a few trillion volts of power and knock down a whole city. You also cannot go beyond the speed of light so your screwed. Your weird machine would just create one hell of a fireworks show.
Sorry I am being a little practical here.
the only part of your cheerful little story that I don't buy into is the "rocks are radioactive" part of it. Some rocks are more than others. Some air is more radioactive than other air. Was the lichen radioactive due to naturally occuring exposure, such that it would have been the same level a century ago?
The world is full of many different phenomenon.
It's also filled with anecdotes trumpeted by people with an agenda.
Or significant power stations that have to be shut down because of leaks and fires in Japan, Canada and the USA? Hmmm?
If what I said is nonsense,
I'm making a point with it.
If what I said makes perfect sense,
you obviously missed the point.
Also, while a single power plant may not have a big impact, with global warming being a concern, collecting more solar energy and focussing it on earth is the wrong direction to go in.
The solution to energy problems on earth seems to me not to beam in more energy from space but to conserve more energy at home. The US in particular is so wasteful of energy that the kind of money spent on those projects would be better spent on some simple, down-to-earth conservation programs.
(I also wonder why this particular avenue is being pursued. Technically, it would seem that simple mylar reflectors in space for night time lighting of urban areas would be a much more logical first step. They could help conserve a lot of energy, would be technically much simpler, and couldn't be easily repurposed for military use. To me, that alternative makes the microwave-based approach suspiciously look like dual-use technology and a boondoggle for certain kinds of research.)
...and it's anti-radiation damage effects, otherwise I might be really worried. Can everyone sing that BNL song about the "hydrofield in my backyard?"
If what I said is nonsense,
I'm making a point with it.
If what I said makes perfect sense,
you obviously missed the point.
Although, the system could also be a VERY effective weapon itself...
Ray
OK, conspiricy theories aside, your point isnt really very apt. Cold fusion is a term for a fanciful, but impossible means of nuclear power that defeats the object it is trying to accomplish and solar power /is/ what we are talking about, but the atmosphere absorbs too much of the solar energy to make it practical to collect on earth.
For the same level of solar cells on Earth we could collect many times that energy in space, and beaming it back to Earth is the problem.
Today we are striving to form clean energy sources and the most logical ones, in todays green culture, are renewable sources such as solar and wind. However, these just do not provide the power per unit we require. Windmill farms are great to power a small farm or village, or perhaps an out-of-the way research facility, but could the power a city?
The only real option is nuclear power. Whether this be by harnessing the suns energy in some way, or creating our own generators, we still have many logistical nightmares.
A "safe" level of microwave radiation is not really going to power a city either and higher levels could cause ecological disastors. Nuclear fission also has the added bonus of toxic watse and fusion is just not yet possible.
ray@demon.net
Quite reasonably though. I wouldnt like to site in a microwave oven.
Mobile phones produce about 0.2W/Kg or microwave radiation inductance, and your brain is effectivly resistant to up to 10W/Kg, but for this thing to beam back an economical amount of power you will need quite a lot more than that, and although it will be aimed precisly, what if it goes wrong?
ray@demon.net
I would like to find more about it but you have given the wrong address. I have been wondering for ages why this idea hadn't been pursued. I just assumed the microwaves would cook everything in it's way...
Of course, none of this invalidates his point. So he's a little off on his history of the Price-Anderson act, does that mean that his objections to it are any less valid?
Note: I'm not familiar with the act, so I am not stating an opinion on it per-se. I'm only staing my opinion of this reply that is -- intentionally or not -- trying to change the subject without answering the actual challenge.
Radioactivity is the break down of atomic nuclei... where would this be happening then? In fusion the nuclei are pushed together to release the bonding energy, and form stable Helium isotopes, which are not radioactive.
/hugh/ capacitors that store up enough energy to boild a kettle, but release it in 1/10th of a nanosecond to produce the equivilent power to all the powerstations in America and Europe combined. The power is routed through two foot thick conduates before finally passing through a thin, liquid Hydrogen wire.
Anyway, there are several types of fusion method theories, and apart from Jet, there is also the Magpie project at Imperial COllege, London:
These guys have four banks of
Remeber that two wires atract each other when currents are passed through, well in the case of a single wire the current will pull all the atoms towards the centre. The idea is that the hugh current will fuse the hydrogen into helium and energy and although quite cool, I cannot think how this actually will work practiacally, other than to wow visitors to the Blackett Lab by saying "your standing on top of a nuclear reactor"
"Nuculear... It's pronounced Nuculear"
- Homer Simpson
Microwave energy would be cheap and clean to harvest from space. I'm sure we all remember the Simcity 2000 disaster where the microwave beam went "off-target" and traced a path of destruction across the city, however. :)
In real life, I don't believe we have to worry about such things.
æeee!
I remember reading a Scientific American article several years ago that talked about something called phase-conjugate optics and how it could make things like radar beams self-focussing. Could this keep a microwave power transmission beam from frying a nearby city?
with that much power, the birds wouldn't just start to cook, they'd explode...
Remember the microwave disaster in simcity? Can't wait till my roof get pierced by a beam of radiation -- maybe it will hit whatever I was about to put in the microwave oven and cook it for me!
See you, space cowboy...
Ok, on average, lets take Sizewell B in East Anglia (UK, nuclear powered) produces 1188MW of power.
Our brains can withstand around 10W of power (over projected area of about 0.1m^2)
which is an intensity of 10/0.1 W/m = 100W/m
this means that to absorb around 80MW of power you would need a receiver of more than:
1188,000,000/100 = 11,880,000m^2 which is a bit silly, and that is an absolute maximun intensity. So we are talking more like a 15,000,000m^2. And that is just to be equivilent to ONE powerstation.
In this case, why (economically) bother? the effort you will go to to save yourself a coal power station is not worth it. It would become redundant as soon as we develop better nuclear power sources.
Ray@demon.net
Evidently Amazon is moving into this business. I was thinking about getting a few yottatons of topsoil, but the UPS service around here is lousy. Also I'd need a bigger shovel.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
But what if the beam misses the power station here on earth? What if it blows up all the surrounding arcologies??
Y'all
Experiment:
Only tangential to all this fun and games but please [do|don't] try this at home.
Open your trusty microwave oven and stick some duct tape over the air vents.
Now take a candle, a really smokey one is best, light it and put it in the microwave.
Shut door and nuke at full power.
Expected result:
Lots of buzzing noise and flickers of electrical activity show up in the candle flame, often starting in the wick. If you are lucky 'globs' of purple plasma will break loose from top of flame and exist as free floating fireballs in the microwave cavity for several seconds.
Microwave oven may burst into flames, so may duct tape, this will probably invalidate your waranty.
Candle will remarkably not melt during reasonable duration tests.
Conclusions:
Parafin wax has little interaction with microwaves and does not appear to heat up much.
Carbon in burning wick and smoke from candle provides a conductive antena absorbing microwave energy, rapidly heating the carbon. In some conditions this can produce a conductive plasma that will continue to absorb microwave energy and make small burn marks on the inside of the case if it touches down.
Duct tape can spontaneously combust when subjected to harsh microwave environments.
Disclamer:
Are you stupid ? This can fuck up your microwave, trip your circuit breakers or burn down your house, you do this at your own risk, bne ready to switch off the wall socket if it gets too scary ! fire extinguisher close by may also be a good idea. You do this at your own risk.
Further experiment:
If you can work out a way to pump microwaves into a magnetic containment field you may be able to produce a beautiful yet deadly microwave driven plasma sculpture floating in free air. Only view through several inches of lead glass, tight wire mesh or big fishtank.
C Ya !
Robin.
Maybe you live in interesting times
Actually, well-run nuclear plants are the are one of CHEAPEST form of electricity generators available. Hyrdro/Wind is cheap too... Depending on the type of reactor, nuclear costs $0.02/kW to $0.03/kW while gas/oil/coal costs $0.03 - $0.04 per kW....Where nuke plants got screwed is back in the 70's the government planned for a nationwide disposal place in Nevada, but the states in fear bitched, (NIMBY syndrome over the transport), and thus now plants are stuck holding the waste locally in pools in concrete blocks....
I consult for a local power company that runs several nuke plants, and if there are any how costs associated with nukes it's due to the NRC & other regulatory committees, but that's the price we pay to have safe Nuke plants (when was the "real" accident in the US? TMI - About 20 years ago?? (And that really got blown out of proportion)
TSIA
You've said it better than I could have, but I did have one minor quibble about the "greenhouse effect."
The "greenhouse effect" occurs on any planet with an atmosphere, be it oxygen, nitrogen, flourine, whatever. Light passes through the atmosphere, warms the planet's surface, and the atmosphere prevents the heat from escaping because it is more opaque to infrared than it was to visible light. This is a Good Thing: without it the earth could not support life; you'd get deadly temperature variations like on the surface of the moon.
What you're referring to is runaway greenhouse effect, as seen on the planet Venus. Basically, the composition of the atmosphere determines how much heat it holds in. Venus' carbon dioxide atmosphere (and its closer proximity to the sun) cause it to hold in lots more heat, and thus the surface of Venus is a furnace.
Like so many other things, the greenhouse effect is not bad in and of itself, unless it gets out of control.
Please forgive my intrusion, but like misusing of "hacker," this just hits one of my buttons.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I would think that the ignorance level about this field of science would be pretty low here on /., but 'nuclear' carries a deep stigma. Too bad, since it holds tremendous promise for plentiful energy. The U.S. will have to face a fossil crisis in the forseeable future, and by then, we will have to buy power from Canada, or beam it from space. Uranium is cheaper.
I'm not a nuclear expert here so I'm very well likely to get schooled pretty hard (and I encourage it please) but what about the 'hot' waste from nuclear power plants? If I'm not mistaken the boron rods can be used in cancer treatment in hospitals but what about the spent fuel? Doesn't it have to be put somewhere for a very long time?
I'd prefer fusion over fission but I think we're a ways from there yet.
Andrew
cool...if they merged it with that electro-shock gun they could open an ionized stream to something and vaporize it by channelling the power of the sun to it...neat-o
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
These answers are not actual answers. I'd have to check my 'propaganda machine' in order to provide sources, references and hard numbers, but...
1) How much fissionable fuel do we really have given _current_ technology?
Essencially limitless. I say this because I've seen projections of consumption and demand (granted, from pro-nukes). These guys feel that nuclear power could supply all of the worlds power needs for thousands of years. Sans fossil, at linearly increasing demand.
Also, I've heard that the fission power would provide enough juice to get fusion off the ground. There's enough hydrogen in them there oceans...
2) Do you have a good waste disposal solution?
I'd said in other posts that the only reason there even is a high-level waste problem, is the regulations imposed on nuclear facilities. The same tech that reburns waste down to an inert state can be used for making weapons, and the Fed doesn't like that being publically available. After all, if the TVA decided to sell Plutonium to the Contras, all hell would break loose.
As for disposing of low-level waste, well, that's equivalently radioactive to the coal ash that comes out of a traditional fossil plant, if not less so. We use that crud to pave highways and fertilize fields.
3) given that wind power is cheaper per kWh (yes, true go research it!), how can you justify the cost?
Actually, here I agree with you. Renewable, 99.44% pure enrgy sources are preferable. There's no risk of accident - no matter how small. Sure, the tower might collapse and kill someone, but it won't render the landscape useless for millenia.
But the wind dies down, the clouds roll in, rivers dry up now and again, and Greenland is so far away. Fission is much more... predictable.
I think that the key to successful power management is the same as for financial investments. Diversification.
Use fossil as the first level, hit-and-run power source to get new infrastructure established. Then put in the nuke plant to serve as rock bottom supply and take the fossils offline. Then, based on the geography and weather conditions of a region, install an enviromentally passive system.
I grant you, a 'natural' system would suffice if there were a single entity responsible for transmission and distribution of thus generated power over an immense area, but you have to accept that it would be a government monopoly. Can't make it work in a deregulated industry.
The other option is to have smaller, cooperating entities, that can supply their rock bottom need (nuclear) and provide their own spinning reserve for nominal use. Then deal with the T&D issues with their peers.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Subject says it all. I can't get the page, that was fast.
Rich
If you read one sig this year, don't read this one!
...Spent nuclear fuel is no more radioactive than the rocks from which the fuel was initally mined in hundreds, not thousands, of years...
What A Relief! My great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will be safe!
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that has got to be one of the stupidist things I've read today. 'Don't worry, it'll be safe 500 years from now!' Of course we'll all be dead. But, hey! Nuclear power was worth it, right?
This is really just an execuse to launch their next generation Orbital Mind-Control Ray satellites that can penetrate tinfoil. Be afraid, be very afraid!
I'm glad to see you're so informed on this topic.
*cough*kneejerk*cough*
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There's so much wrong with that idea it's hard to know where to start. They can't keep the beam tight enough to prevent spread, so it'll hit surrounding areas with safe levels. Safe like a cell phone next to your head. At least I choose not to have a cell phone, I now have to be careful where I live or work, too? What a bunch of idiots. Make them all live at ground zero. Clearly they all played SimCity2k and thought it was a great idea.
OK, so they want to build a structure 22 miles long, carrying thousands of large solar collectors. It will be in geosynchronous orbit, so it should be in the shadow of the Earth for at least part of the day.
So my question is, why not just build it in the middle of a desert here on Earth? It would probably cost an order of magnitude less than putting it in space.
Oh, wait, this idea is sponsored by NASA, so of course it has to be in space.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I remember hearing about some weapon the US military developed some time ago that fired microwaves at designated targets. It effectively cooks people from the inside out. I wonder if this "power station" is really a satellite weapon based on the microwave weapon design. If so, I'd expect the US to be causing some major problems in regards to violations of international laws some time after the "power station" is up in place.
All very good questions that aren't answered in the article.
As for keeping birds from flying in the area, well you can't keep them out so I guess they consider all of the cooked birds as reasonable losses.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
And there's bound to be some major spreading. What is the decrease in intensity from the target point in %falloff/meter? Where are any numbers on this stuff? Geez. Anyway, I would think that if the microwave power transmissions from space to earth were kept at "safe" (Ack! This needs defining too) levels, the amount of power received would not be enough to be useful for anything. Why not just ground based solar collectors (thermal to heat fluid and spin turbines as well as the photovoltaic kind)?
Just think of the benefits that could be realized with microwave irradiation.
We could maintain a comfortable minimum temperature in some of the world's coldest areas. Imagine, Fargo in the middle of winter, at a balmy 75 degF. Weather forecasters could actually guarantee tomorrow's highs. Swimming pools and car engines would always be warm, as would be the toilet seats across the nation.
If we can tighten the beam enough, and develop super-precise satellite navigation systems, we could use one of these puppies for snow removal on the nation's highways. We could even melt a few hundred thousand acres of the Sahara for use as the world's biggest mirror for the world's biggest telescope..
Now everyone, from L.A. to Bangor Maine can have a nice tan. Just go out during the designated irradiation period (day or night) and stare up into the sky. Oh, and all the stylish tinfoil hats we'd all have to wear. And clothes would stay 'fresh-from-the-dryer' warm, all day.
Remember how grandma would cool off freshly baked pies by setting them on the window sill? Well, now we'll be able to thaw the Thanksgiving turkey that way..
Just think, no more mosquitoes! At 6:30 each night, get off the patio. Then ZAP! 30 seconds later, not a 'skeeter in a 500 mile radius. Just be sure to bring in the pets.
We could aim the thing at the Antarctic, and make the world's biggest ice sculpture... Seriously though, maybe carve off a big iceberg and haul it to where there's a drought? Well, maybe not.
On the down side, leaving a dog in a closed car on a hot summer day would be kinder than leaving him out on the lawn. Hot dogs anyone?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
What they should do is either put the array in geo-synchronus orbit and then tether it to the ground and pipe the power down through the tether
or put the microwave reciever on the end of the tether and beam the microwaves UP to the reciever.
Imagine what would happen if some tiny piece of space junk were to knock the orbiting collector off course? The bean would be moved away from its recieving source...probably vaporizing everything that it touches...
It would be like a magnifying glass is to an ant...except it would probably be a much larger beam and we'd be burned to a crisp in seconds...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Sorry for the confusion. No, the receiving end does not need to do that much concentrating. The problem is at the transmission end, where the designs that I've seen concentrate power at a single point to beam it down to earth. Multiple concentrators with multiple transmitters is a possibility, but you start to add a lot of weight.
Well, yes...since the speaker from the SSI talked about it, *and* the *two* Environmental Impact Statements already done, WHEN HE SPOKE AT THE MONTHLY PHILA. S.F. SOC. MEETING AROUND 1982.
And no, we are *NOT* talking about broadcast power, we're talking about it being beamed to receivers in places like the desert, from whence it would be fed into the power grid. Also, the power levels being discussed back then were around a few watts/meter sq., not enough to cook a vulture. Again, we're *NOT* talking about SDI-style Power Beams (tm) here.
It would be the least polluting source of the electric power that we can produce...and before anyone starts arguing, consider:
a) nuclear wastes;
b) acid rain;
c) river and estuary water warming from
coolants;
d) mining;
e) transporting oil (Exon Valdez) and
natural gas (pipelines).
So...let's *go* for it, already. They've been babbling about it for half my life. I'd be *ecstatic* to go up there to help build it.
mark
Uhhh, actually there are quite a few technically geeky, scientifically literate people who have concerns about stuff like this. Luddites are against technology in general, people for technology in general are just as bad. People who find some technology frightning are just intelligent.
There's no need to spend money on this kind of science fiction for a while.
Fusion research has been languishing for years, obtaining only small slices of the funding pie. Despite this fact, researchers have already developed fusion reactors that generate a controlled energy profit. Granted, there are cheaper ways to boil water today, but the price tag is shrinking.
Fusion power plants would create no radioactive waste whatsoever. They take in deuterium (a Hydrogen isotope found in so-called "heavy water", which is easily mined right from the oceans), and put out energy, Helium, and other harmless by-products.
As an aside, note that Helium is a "perishable" resource; the Earth was only born with so much, and it's light enough to escape into space. People laughed a few years back at the "waste" of money in maintaining a national Helium repository, but they shouldn't have. It's a very valuable element for research, and it's disappearing.
Fusion power would utilize a plentiful resource, and provide energy at enormous efficiency (*much* greater than current fission-based nuclear power), without harming the environment. Yet, it continues to get scanty funding.
Write your Congressman and encourage spending on a power supply that has already been developed and has no bad side effects. This microwave stuff might be quite helpful for supplying the moon with electricity (of course, so might simple aluminum foil reflectors that simply concentrate sunlight on lunar power cells), but we're still a ways off from needing it there. Perhaps the money that would be saved by replacing our current power plants with fusion-based counterparts could help pay for the next leap ahead in the space program.
Take a geiger counter to your local nuclear power plant. Record the radiation levels. Do the same at your local coal power plant.
Guess which one will come out higher?
If you said "nuclear," you're wrong. Nuclear plants, at least in this country, are shielded to the point of rampant paranoia. You have a better chance of being killed hiding in your basement than you do sitting next to a nuclear plant. Higher levels of radiation there, too.
The only plants that have succeeded in harming people are those badly-designed pieces of trash in Eastern Europe. Nuclear plants, when well-designed and maintained, are as safe as any other source of power.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Washington D.C.: (AP)
Bill Gates and Al Gore died - burnt to a crisp - when the pacific northwest microwave satellite was inexplicably nudged half a degree off its lock on a seattle receiving station and passed over their podium during a debate between at Washington U over which one invented the Web.
This satellite was owned by MicroSoft and was being used to power 15,000 quad Xeon Windows NT servers about to be deployed next week at Hotmail.
The article that you cite does mention that there has to be a return path; this would mean either a loop or other more exotic methods (such as the plasma gun suggested in the article).
The setup described is fundamentally different from what the original poster was suggesting, though - the sky hook generates power from the motion of the shuttle through the Earth's magnetic field. The original poster suggested stringing wires from the surface of the Earth upwards, which are stationary with respect to the Earth's magnetic field.
Any method of power generation that taps motion with respect to a magnetic field is actually just drawing power from the kinetic energy implicit in that motion - i.e., as you generate power, you slow down with respect to that field. For something in low earth orbit, like the shuttle using a sky hook as described, this will eventually degrade your orbit and bring you back to earth. The kinetic energy that you're tapping is also just the kinetic energy that you gave the shuttle during liftoff - so using this kind of scheme for power generating satellites is not useful, as you are just getting back the energy that you put into the satellite in the first place to put it in orbit.
There are other neat ways that you can use sky hooks, other neat things that you can do with extremely strong tethers, and ways of using tall towers to generate power on Earth, but these are beyond the scope of this discussion.
Actually, the best way I found was to build a one-square bump, put 8 waterfall tiles on the 8 sides of the bump, put hydroelectric plants on the 8 waterfall tiles, and put a water pump on top of the bump.
The big advantage to this was that hydroelectric power plants never wear out, and the water pumps operate at maximum efficiency, because they are surrounded completely by water.
Plus, no pollution.
- John
Are you saying the problem is that you vaporize the recieving-end equipment, or is the "concentrator" on the sending side?
If it's the recieving side, why not just heat water on the recieving end and use that for power generation? No doubt it's less efficient... but if it solves the "biggest problem", well...
Cold fusion may not be "real" but then so far it is just as real as Tokomaks.
Solar has been practically collected by trees since the Beginning. You may not get the energy density you think you need. Give some consideration to storage media to up the available density. For example, check into the economics and capacity of solutions of Glauber's salt.
When they start talking about "safe" levels then we'll start hearing about "acceptable" risks. When Rocky Flats plutonium was discovered in backyards in Denver suburbs exceeding the "acceptible" dosage, the acceptable dosage was multiplied by ten. That solved that problem.
You take a rational tack to discussion, but when you start saying "the only real option" you are backing into the rubric of industry propaganda. Another very real option is more conservation... there is massive room for improvement there. Do all our skyscrapers really need to be lit up at night? Ever seen a nighttime satellite photo of the US? Why are we beaming all those photons up there? How about all those TV tubes to be replaced by flat screens? and so on.
I'm glad people are thinking of the future. But I wouldn't bet the future on any robots, thanks.
There seems to be a lot of controversy in the media and in scientific circles about the safety of exposure to electromagnetic fields. I did find one article online that seemed relatively well-informed (it was well-documented anyway). And it's fairly recent - 1995, iirc. Anyhow, you can check it out here. As always, try to keep in mind that correlation!=causation. :)
Now THAT one is improbable. . . the building is poured concrete. . .now, the PARKING LOTS, on the other hand. .
Concrete will turn to slag, if you get it hot enough. Even if you don't melt it, you might be able to turn it into the world's largest stone oven. Just before the attack, they'll be wondering why three tractor-trailers full of Pillsbury Cinamon Rolls are being delivered.
The only thing you're trying to do with the transmitter is create a wavefront travelling in the right direction. You can do this by reflecting a spherical wave radiating from a point source; this is the classic "telescope optics" technique. It also requires concentrating the power to create the point source. So don't do that. Phased arrays generate the wavefront directly, by controlling the phase and amplitude of many small transmitting elements. There are no problems with concentrating the power at one or a few points, because the power never needs to be concentrated.
Followup question: Regardless of the quality of the sludge that comes out of the reactor, what do you do with it? Are there any safe ways to dispose of it yet?
Hey,
Being that public money is putting this thing into space, will the resultant energy be free? Or rather, already paid for......
I'm sure some private corp will get the profits...
There were experiements which showed that we could actually construct nuclear power plants which burned off all of the excess radioactive waste except for a very small amount which isn't even harmful.
There were experiements which showed that we could have actually constructed nuclear power plants which used HALF as much water as current ones and STILL cool effectively.
Of course, we can no longer construct new nuclear power plants, so they may end up going down in history as bad just because the older ones produce tons of harmful radioactive waste and we cannot build newer ones which wouldn't.
Hopefully we can get the kind of power from microwave power plants that would could in SimCity 2000 and 3000. If not, we can always turn back to safe nuclear (The problem is convincing the rest of the world that this is possible.)
Julian
--
eMail: x-virge@shafe.com
icq: 1521358
http://www.delanet.com/~jkmissig/
First, bomb-grade plutonium was only made in Hanford, WA in a facility called the "N reactor", if memory serves. This was a special unit, which irradiated uranium very briefly before reprocessing it to extract the plutonium. Spent fuel from commercial nuclear plants has never been used to make bombs; most of it is still sitting in cooling pools at the plants where it was used. Conclusion 1: Commercial US nuclear power was never associated with bombs.
Second: The requirement for bombs is that plutonium have very little of the troublesome 238, 240 and 241 isotopes. If you have very much, the bomb is far more likely to "fizzle" than explode. As soon as plutonium is created it begins to transmute from the neutron bombardment, so making bomb-grade Pu requires removing and reprocessing very frequently, on a schedule of weeks. Fuel in commercial US nuclear plants is left in the core, running at far higher power levels than the N reactor, for years. By the time it comes out, it's so chock-full of higher isotopes that no bomb designer would even think about using it. The rate of spontaneous fissions is so high that you can't get a supercritical mass assembled before it takes itself apart (without producing any significant bang). Conclusion 2: Commercial US nuclear power reactors cannot be used to make bomb materials (and still make power). Soviet RMBK's are another matter, but we don't use them.
Now go, and FUD no more.
I'd just like it noted that the IQ level will remain exactly the same, with 100 being the median. It's a quotient. As everyone gets smarter, it stays the same. It just takes more to get a "high-IQ" than it used to. Intelligence may increase, and the IQ standard mayrise, but the IQ-level itself (unless no other countries benefit) should remain about the same.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
There were dozens of books written about this idea, some years ago. Doesn't anybody remember them?
What NASA is planning, I dunno. The site doesn't discuss details.
The proposal, from O'Neil's book, and others, was to place large (1-3 miles in diameter) receiving stations in the desert, and to spread the microwave beam so that its intensity would be no more than 3-5 times the normal solar radiation in the area.
Nobody was ever talking about high-intensity, tight-beamed masers.
Building anything from materiel we drag up out of this hole is going to be prohibitively expensive. Which is why we need to get some sort of mining activity going on out there. If we can produce the structural materials from materiel that is already in orbit, the costs make a lot more sense.
Washington D.C.: (AP)
Hackers [yeah, I know, but it's a news story] took over the Eastern Seabord Microwave Generation Satellite earlier today, and threatened to redirect the beam at downtown D.C. if Kevin Mitnick was not released immediately.
Al Gore, the inventor of microwave energy, who singlehandedly placed the aforementioned satellite in orbit, declined, to the dismay of the hackers.
Officials at the Pentagon were heard to scream in agony as the installation was turned into a smoldering heap of molten slag.
The hackers, subsequently, threaten to defrost Hillary Clinton; but assure that the Antarctic penguin habitat is not threatened in any way.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This is fscking great! Fried chickens falling out of the sky! Somebody invent a machine to make it rain beer!
--
This is not my sandwich.
Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" was first published in Amazing Science Fiction, in 1940 and republished in 1950 in the collection The Man Who Sold the Moon.
--
This is not my sandwich.
This is something of a problem not far away from where I live - in Cornwall, England, Radon poisoning is very commonplace, because many of the houses there have stone basements.
Tally-ho, yippety-dip, and zing zang spillip. Looking forward to bullying off for the final chukka?
Helium escapes the atmosphere rather quickly, given that it's the second lightest molecule out there (more or less, ignoring pathological cases); in fact, any helium released to the atmosphere is gone as far as we're concerned, and we're not getting it back. The reason we have helium now is that their used to be helium around, and when volcanoes and the like spat out molten rock, the cooling rock formed bubbles, and those bubbles have helium in them. This and other things created the current situation -- no helium in the atmosphere, but a fair amount buried underground. That's where we get our helium now -- we mine it. And when we run out of helium to mine, we don't have any more helium.
-- Your friendly neighborhood AC
Guess not. I just went back over what had been written, and that was indeed there. So, ok, what I had thought was a really minor problem is even more minor.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Doesn't this term just ultimately remind you of that episode of South Park with the 50 foot satellite dish sticking out of Cartman's ...
Blowups Happen was the first. I'm not even certain that it wasn't in the 30's (but that feels TOO early). It was definitely before '45 (it may have been during the war).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What the original poster is talking about is a massive sky hook, I think, which isn't a loop. Check out the link.
1. One set of comments were concerned with a metal-skinned airplane flying through the microwaves. This writer obviously didn't remember his high school science classes, otherwise he would have known that a metal-skinned airplane is a Faraday Cage, which prevents radio waves from penetrating the interior
Wouldn't the airplane have to be grounded to be a Faraday Cage?
"Last time I checked, the latest study on cellular radiation showed that people who used cell
phones were more imaginative and intellectual than those who did not."
All that means is that those who are "more imaginative" and "intellectual" earn more money than those who aren't and can afford (or require) mobile phones.
Statistics can be very dangerous. Apply them with caution.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
No, he talked about commercial reactors being plutonium factories and made a snide remark about "the peaceful atom". This implies that commercial reactors are in the business of making bomb materials, and that is outrageously false.
If this is actually built, then there will be enough space construction to reduce the costs considerably (which way, I wonder). Then the astronomers could relocate to the back side of the moon. (And yeah, they'd probably need to.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Let's just hope somebody doesn't crack into the guidance system and threaten to boil the nation if we don't delete Microsoft or something.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
No, Sim City should be sued for using the ideas of Glaser et al. without giving them any credit. (The idea of the Solar Power Satellite is about 25 years old.)
Highly Unlikely. Beamed solar power is actually a fairly old idea, dating back to the 1970s at least. Studies done at the time called for very large receiver arrays, on the order of several square miles, simply because it would be impossible to keep a microwave beam tightly focused over the 32,000 odd miles from geosyncronous orbit to the ground. The result was that even a multi-hundred megawatt beam would be scattered out enough that any living thing entering the target area would only feel a little warm. Electrical interference would probably be a bigger problem. Microwave satelites would probably make a more effective information-war weapon than even some of the EMP bombs being developed.
The biggest environmental concern I can see is that even with a very efficient antenna array on the ground, quite a bit of energy is going to be lost to heat. If a large number of satelites were put into operation, they could heat the atmosphere significantly over several decades of operation. That could be a global warming threat nearly on par with switching entirely to coal for electrical production.
On the other hand, those satelites could be real useful at Mars. Just point a bunch of them at the surface and start warming and thickening the atmosphere. Once they were in place, the terrawatts of energy needed for terraforming would effectively be free.
L Ron and co are a bunch of morons.
Anyways, the ideal power source would be to string up a very long conductor from the earths surface to 100 or 200 kilometers into space. Hook up a small weight on the end to keep it in geosyncronous orbit and then reap the electricity coming off it in droves as it cuts through the earths magnetic field.
What we REALLY need to be doing is drop an incredibly strong tether down from the satellite to earth, the ultra-way-way-long orange extension cord!
I have no scientific training at all, but I'd thought that I had read that woven bucky tubes might be strong enough to actually do that. (I.E. the geo-synchronous orbit tether ball, space Elevator, etc.) Is that true? If it were possible (no matter how unlikely) we could just set up a controlled air space around the cord, trust flying animals to not bump into things.
Of course, if the cord ever broke it'd be kinda messy, but still pretty cool!
Drake42
> coal power plants give off MUCH more radiation than nuclear plants
Interesting, but I highly doubt that this is true. The only radiation source I could see is from radioactive K or something.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
IIRC the reason microwave ovens work is that the microwaves are tuned to the energy of a bond in the water molecule. Thus microwaves heat up water. They don't heat up ice, and dry foods heat only slowly.
The problem is to get lots of energy from orbit to earth. Using mirrors and light would work, but light is absorbed by lots of things, and anything which absorbs lots of energy in any form is going to suffer.
So the challenge is to use a radiation which will go straight through almost anything that might stray into its path, but can still be picked up and converted by the receiving station. I guess the researchers have picked a band in the microwave spectrum which doesn't interact strongly with water or protein bonds - I don't know how easy this is. The receiver just needs an antenna designed for the particular band (this might be an array of simple rod-type dipoles, or a big horn/waveguide).
Of course (metal) airplanes will be a problem, but there are already plenty of no-fly-zones on the globe, I don't see a few more being a problem. (I assume the collector will be geostationary).
L. Ron (and NASA for that matter) stole the idea from Issac Asimov. One of the stories in "I, Robot" was about a station that collected solar energy and fed it back to earth in a tight beam. It even mentioned the effect it would have if the beam went off even by a fraction of an inch.
This was written in the mid/late '40's, I believe.
...the movie ``The Quiet Earth'' in which, if memory serves, a similar system was being implemented and nearly everyone on Earth was killed.
Just repeat: It was only a movie. It was only a movie.
Seriously, this'll have an impact on aircraft flight plans. Hope they're taking that into account in their design. They should consider some sort of beacon system that alerts pilots what they're about to enter into a zone where they could get parboiled.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Not all radiation is the same. Unlike radiation from nuclear reactions, RF radiation is not annodizing radiation.
If you put a frog in a microwave, you're less likely to get a mutant frog than French cuisinne.
RF basically just bakes things; not much different than getting burned. The nasty thing is that, unlike a good 'ol fire-induced burn, RF heats tissue up from the inside out. So if you're subjected to a high degree of RF radiation, you're likely to be damaged by it before you begin to notice warnings. The amount of damage is deturmined by the power of the RF source, the distance from that source, and how long it took you to notice you're being radiated (length of time exposed to the source).
There's hysteria, and then there's real problems. Nuclear plants have both.
Yeah, it would probably be very difficult to reprocess the fuel to make bombs, but the plutonium IS in there, so you can do it with chemistry rather than diffusion plants, etc. OTOH, there's GOBS of "spent" fuel, that's much too weak to use for fuel profitably, but too radioactive to discard into a normal dump. Nobody's figured out what to do with it, so it just piles up. V. bad. My preference is a]dry, b] enclose in a glass bricks, c] enclose the glass bricks in cement, d] transport them to Nevada, e] pile them up in a wall around [but inside of] the edge of area 51. (It's a military base, so nobody should be there anyway, right.)
Still, until we get agreement, the **** garbage sits in dangerous locations and accumulates.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The Arthur D. Little (consulting) Company first championed this idea back in the 1970s, long before Sim City.
Probably the best place to prototype microwave power transmision would be at the Straight of Belle Ilse, in Canada, between the Island of Newfoundland and Labrador. Vast quantities of hydro-electric power are going undeveloped in Labrador because there is no way to transfer it across the 20 miles of the Straight. Undersea cables won't work because icebergs drag across the bottom of the Straight in winter. Tunneling is prohibitavely expensive due to the hard rock.
The biggest problem, however, relates to concentrating the power, from whatever source, just before creating the microwave beam. You have lots of megawatts all going through a single point. Any resistance at all -- and you quickly heat your concentrator and vaporize it.
Actually, Nuclear power is destined to die out from a financial perspective. Including all the operating costs and overhead, a Nuclear power plant costs ~$4000 per kW-H, compaired to coal or oil at ~$10 per kW-H. It is just too expensive to run Nuclear Power Plants.
Hydrolectric dams though.... (free power, and they didn't have the 50 year lifespan of the other power sources)
Son, I _AM_ a Sour Gas Well ... and I'm having a hell of a time living near me.
Sorry about the tone of the subject, but I am just a bit annoyed at the garbage being spouted on this list. YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT BEFORE YOU OPEN YOUR MOUTH, OTHERWISE KEEP IT SHUT!
Now that I have offended a lot of you, let me explain:
There have been a number of comments on this list which are devoid of any basis in scientific fact:
1. One set of comments were concerned with a metal-skinned airplane flying through the microwaves. This writer obviously didn't remember his high school science classes, otherwise he would have known that a metal-skinned airplane is a Faraday Cage, which prevents radio waves from penetrating the interior
2. Another comment was about the satellite being in geosyncronous orbit. First, it depends on the season as to whether or not the satellite will be in shadow. Second. even if it is in shadow it would not be there for long. Third, multiple satellites could be positioned so that only a small percentage of them would be in shadow at any one time.
3. Global warming. If we could beam the energy from space and use it here then we could discontinue the use of fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would reduce the global warming problem
4. Transmission of the energy. This is a problem, but there has already been demonstrated a greater than 50% recovery of energy transmitted. Also, the receivers would be spread out over a large area, such as a desert.
5. The "safe" levels of microwave energy would be less than the energy from a radar gun, it would be gathered by the receivers being spread out over a large area.
Lest I be taken not agreeing with anybody, I do admit that there are major problems needed to be solved, including but not limited to the total cost of building this. Also, the transmission and recovery of the energy are still major problems which still need to be either refined or solved.
There is a book written by Lee Correy called Space Doctor, which although being fiction does go into the science of this a bit.
JBB
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
Doubt me? The nuclear wastes at Hanford are already being mined for isotopes of iridium (IIRC; no references handy) and the like which are being used in nuclear medicine. Seems that some of these secondary fission products have useful properties, like being able to stop the growth of muscle cells which causes coronary arteries to re-occlude after angioplasty. It's all a matter of point of view and being willing to consider waste as maybe being a raw material.
Disassemble Sirius B. Nobody's using it right now. That I know of. :-)
(Well, ok. We need to wait a few years.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In fact, it's prolonged exposure to very low levels of radiation that does the most damage to one's DNA and cellular structures. It's much harder for the body to combat prolonged low-levels than spikes of high levels (except of course for lethal levels, duh).
The government has just been squashing research that shows this until recently when studies have gotten out.
Not only does coal contain uranium and thrium, but also releases lots of other toxic stuff into the *air* heres a quote from this site about it http://www.uilondon.org/sym/1998/rosen.htm
Small amounts of radioactive substances are permitted to be released during nuclear power plant operations. Coal plant
operations also release radioactive substances, as coal always contains trace quantities of naturally occurring radioactive
elements, such as uranium, thorium and their radioactive decay products. These radioactive substances are released into the
atmosphere or contained in remaining ash, some of which is used for land fill and in building materials. The United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in its 1997 report estimated that on average radiation
exposures from nuclear and coal power plants are similar.
Because of fuel impurities, a 1000 MWe coal plant produces annually on average some 320 000 tonnes of ash containing 400
tonnes of hazardous heavy metals, consisting of 63 t of vanadium, 38 t of mercury, 15 t of cobalt, and 13 t each of lead and
nickel, along with smaller amounts of antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, selenium, tellurium, and thallium, all
categorised as hazardous under the Basle Convention. Additionally, without abatement technology, 44 000 tonnes of sulphur
oxides and 22 000 tonnes of nitrous oxides are waste products that are dispersed into the atmosphere. These quantities do not
include large amounts of waste from associated energy chain activities, principally from vast mining and transportation
requirements (see Figure 4).
Fossil power plants using modern abatement technology can decrease noxious gas releases as much as ten-fold, but
significant quantities of solid waste are produced in the process. Depending on the sulphur content, solid waste quantities from
sulphur abatement procedures for a 1000 MWe plant are annually as much as 500 000 tonnes for coal, more than 300 000
tonnes for oil and some 200 000 tonnes for natural gas sweetening procedures. Much of the waste, which contains small
quantities of toxic substances, is commonly stored in ponds as slurry or used for landfill and various other purposes. Regulatory
bodies are increasingly classifying some of this waste as hazardous.
I've just got a few questions
1) How much fissionable fuel do we really have given _current_ technology?
2) Do you have a good waste disposal solution?
3) given that wind power is cheaper per kWh (yes, true go research it!), how can you justify the cost?
But blowups happen was about a nuclear power plant (before nuclear power plants actually existe) the premise of the story was that the plant had to be extremely huge to go critical, and had to be monitored like a hawk in order to prevent it from blowing up. This plant provided power for the whole country, andif the guy at the button monitoring the thing fell asleep for a second they thought the thing would take out the southwest US, but that was an acceptable risk. After awhile though, they discovered that all the big craters on the moon had been created when these things blew up, rendering it uninhabitable. (this story was written before modern asteroid impact theory) Once they discovered that they were sitting on something that could wipe out the human race, they had to debate whether or if they could shut it down without kiling every living thing on earth. Excellent story for its time, it now resides in Expanded Universe, a collection of short heinlein storys, a must read for the heinlein fan. Suffice to say, Blowups Happen had nothing to do with microwave beams, or orbiting power stations.
Eliminate the Price-Anderson Act, and the civilian Nuclear Energy system would be shut down by the beancounters.
I'd blame it more on the lawyers and public hysteria. Just as Dow-Corning has been bankrupted by breast implant suits despite the latest scientific evidence claiming no link between implants, the threat of lawsuits is enough to cripple development of further plants. Yet the ones that exist in the U.S. work cleanly and safely, as opposed to coal plants which result in coal miner deaths, hydroelectric plants which disrupt the whole water ecosphere, fuel-burning plants which lead to spills, etc. Maybe solar plants (using mirrors to concentrate the light, so the environmental impact of the collectors is low), wind-powered ones, or salinity or thermal-gradient plants could do better, but not by much.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Hmmm... yeah... that'll work until a flock of some endangered or protected species fly through and get cooked right out of the air.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Actually, the earliest I saw this idea was in a short by Robert Heinlein titled "Blowups Happen". It was written in the 40s, I believe (If I dig up a reference to the first publication, I will).
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Jabber wrote:
.now, the PARKING LOTS, on the other hand. . .
Washington D.C.: (AP) Hackers [yeah, I know, but it's a news story] took over the Eastern Seabord Microwave Generation Satellite earlier today, and threatened to redirect the beam at downtown D.C. if Kevin Mitnick was not released immediately.
Millions of Americans cheer on those intrepid hackers. . . .
Al Gore, the inventor of microwave energy, who singlehandedly placed the aforementioned satellite in orbit, declined, to the dismay of the hackers.
Are you sure ??? Besides, seeing Al MOVE is unusual enough, seeing him take action is as rare as a bug-free release from Redmond. . .
Officials at the Pentagon were heard to scream in agony as the installation was turned into a smoldering heap of molten slag.
Now THAT one is improbable. . . the building is poured concrete. .
The hackers, subsequently, threaten to defrost Hillary Clinton; but assure that the Antarctic penguin habitat is not threatened in any way.
What is she doing there ?? You can't run for Senate in Antarctica ??? {evil grin}
Cooked birds? If you got into somewhere, and then got too hot wouldn't you leave? Remember that microwaves are not, and do not act like, ionizing radiation. Just exactly what they do depends on the wave length, but if the "receiver" is inappropriate, then they won't be absorbed. I expect that for power transmission they would pick a wavelength that found water transparent, so the antenna would need to be an electrical conductor large enough to pick up ??
If the wave length was a millimeter (rather than actually micro) things might be more efficient. Not sure. I believe that the shorter the wave length the more critical the antenna is. (Although, given enough power [high concentration seems dubious] and enough time [but birds would only pass through...unless the beam was absorbed by water they would probably be safe])
P.S.: These are just thoughts. I am not an expert.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well the link is /.'d. Big surprise.
This might not seem like a big deal, but unless they go geosynchronous (which is a long way a way to be broadcasting power), there's going to be a lot of 'em (remember the world is two thirds water so most of the time they'll be over the ocean) and if they put these things in LEO they'll be bright as hell. Iridium communication satellites routinely flare to -magnitude -6, and occaisionally to magnitude -8 which is more than bright enough to be seen in broad daylight.
There's a certain charm to satellite spotting, to be sure, but at some point it's going to get ridiculous, and the night sky will be spoiled for astronomy and plain old stargazing. I for one find it a bit irritating that I can hike out the remotest place I can find, but then the night sky is filled with satellites (if you haven't been to a good dark sky site in a while, you'll be surprised; you can pretty much spot a satellite anytime you look for one).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nuclear? (Or as some say: "Nuculer"...yuck)
:-)
I used fusion power - definately the best power plant available in SC2k without the help of a Hex editor. Though the best thing to do was to use Simcity (the original, like version 1.0000 back in the late eighties that used those squares for passwords), use a program called zap.exe to give yourself 0x7FFFFFFF dollars (a little over $2,130,000,000) and then convert it to an sc2k map. With that you could build 40 fusion power plants to start (naturally starting in 2050) and have all the money you`d ever need. (I once dropped below two billion dollars). You also have excellent ratings because you give no taxes....umm...I`m getting totally off track.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
The cause and effect are probably reversed there. I wonder how many intellectual people choose to use cell phones..
fellow came into the plant (the Nuclear Power Plant) a few years back and set off the alarms on the way in
Amen! Due to the very vocal and hugely ignorant opposition to nuclear power, most people don't know the facts. FUD is rampant against nukes, and when people hear the word 'nuclear' they think Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
The facts are:
Nuclear can be very dangerous, when it goes bad. It's quite spectacular. But, it is so regulated, and the people involved are highly aware of the dangers, that the likelyhood of accidents is miniscule.
I would think that the ignorance level about this field of science would be pretty low here on
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Ah, I thought the article had been Slashdotted. Maybe it has actually been shut down for violating Scientology trade secrets.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
'Nuff said...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Remember when nuclear power was being deployed, the hype that surrounded it? The "killer app" of power turned out to be more of a killer than anybody had bargained for. Even if Simcity 2k style things don't happen, are there other things that might?
For instance:
It stated in the article that the levels of radiation will be "safe." I presume that means safe for humans, i.e. non-lethal dosages. But remember that radiation has a tendancy to mutate things, and that humans are not the only thing that can mutate. So can birds, frogs, and airborne bacteria.
While it may seem farfetched, it is entirely possible that these moderately high-powered beams of radiation could create such a high level of mutation in airborne bacteria as to create a "super bacteria," resistant against antibiotics and, most importantly, already airborne.
Just some food for thought....
Russell P.
See you, space cowboy...
Remember when nuclear power was being deployed, the hype that surrounded it? The "killer app" of power turned out to be more of a killer than anybody had bargained for. Even if Simcity 2k style things don't happen, are there other things that might? For instance: It stated in the article that the levels of radiation will be "safe." I presume that means safe for humans, i.e. non-lethal dosages. But remember that radiation has a tendancy to mutate things, and that humans are not the only thing that can mutate. So can birds, frogs, and airborne bacteria. While it may seem farfetched, it is entirely possible that these moderately high-powered beams of radiation could create such a high level of mutation in airborne bacteria as to create a "super bacteria," resistant against antibiotics and, most importantly, already airborne. Just some food for thought.... Russell P.
See you, space cowboy...
I'm sitting here looking at the large whole in the top of my microwave and the can of food sitting melted in a whole in the ceiling and wondering, how are they planning to build a microwave receiver station with no metal?
Oh, and, don't expect much in the way of cell phone reception any more after they put those up in space.:-)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I have an idea for an anti-matter warp core drive but need a shit load of power running in a coil in 2 directions so I can smash them together and create ant-electrons. I have super conductor coil as a speak and plan to charge this thing with huge amounts of power. I wonder If I could ilegally tap into this beam to charge it up. IT would need more power then the accelorator at farmlabs near chicago.
Thank you very much for that clarification.
What was your friend measuring it _with_? I don't even think you *can* measure microwaves with anything that measures REMs.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
the NASA will be sued for patent infringment really soon by the makers of SimCity2000.
...so long as you turn on No Disasters. And make sure you have funds for it to be auto-replaced every 40 years. Of course, if you wait for Fusion, it's much more cost-efficient, and it's completely safe even with No Disasters.
-Imperator
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
actually, a dyson sphere would only have to harness all the energy coming from the sun in order to classify us as a K2 society (one that has harnesed all the energy of a star) So all you would have to do was surround the sun with some eifficient thin film solar cells, which would take only the mass of say mercury ( and convieneiently located too) while all the energy could be beamed to a living area somewhere else, if we hollowed out all the asteroids, the livable area would be at least as great as the inner surface of a dyson sphere (1.086e17 km^2, if orbited at earths orbit), and if you hollowed out the moon ( you couldnt hollow out the earth obviously, its molten!), the sheer volume would be astronomical, and if it were converted into floor space, it would be about 8.97e13 km^2 A few orders of magnitude less than the sphere, butabout five orders of magnitude greater than the surface area of the earth (including the oceans, 5.1e8 km^2) It wouldnt be quite as much living space as a dyson sphere, but it would be about like having ten thousand earths to live on. And that moon figure is based on 2m between floors. At any rate, the point is, we could use all the power from our star, which is what dyson was talking about when he came up with the sphere.
There was an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette earlier this week. Here is an online version:
7 12solar1.asp
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19990
It's much longer and more informative than the one on the CMU site...
way more efficient.
While it is amusing to consider the impact of a microwave beam toasting your favorite politician / used car dealer / whatever, it's not a likely scenario. The tranmitter in orbit will consist of a phased array of individual elements. These are then run in an invert-and-boost mode, like a phase conjugating mirror, synchronized by a pilot beam sent up from the receiver on the ground.
The receiving station has to be large, otherwise diffraction effects prevent it from sending a pilot beam which can be backtracked properly by the satellite (basically, it has to be large enough to resolve the satellite's antenna from the ground, using microwave wavelengths). The satellite elements themselves would be incapable of coherent coordination, so if the pilot beam is lost, the satellite elements defocus and the power beams out harmlessly diffuse (recall that the total power of the beam must be less than that of the sunlight hitting the station). In order for a terrorist group to retarget the beam on a specific location they would have first to build a several square kilometre antenna farm around their target, then supply the pilot beam up to the satellite (which would happily send out two beams, one to the actual ground station and one to this giant terrorist installation). I've heard talk that the pilot beam itself would be "encrypted" in some way, but I don't consider that information reliable.
Of course, it's probably just easier at this point to plug your terrorist antenna farm into the electrical mains and watch the politicians / used car salesmen / whatever electrocute themselves while saying, "What's this big set of metal things here?"
For those of you interested in some related reading, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story entitled "Reason," in which robots assist in the operation of one of these microwave stations. It's an interesting foray into issues of logic, thought, and theology - among others.
I would also recommend A.C. Clarke's "The Star," another short story in which Clarke explores faith and other theological issues. A good read, that. Provides a slightly different perspective of christianity.
... called Sunstroke. It was pretty light on the science - the portrayal of the AI controlling the satellite was particularly laughable. However, the graphic portrayals of how human bodies react to being microwaved did earn it a halfway decent gross-out factor.
The whole thing has to be a joke! "Safe power levels?" You need a few megawatts to power a small manufacturing plant. A whole city requires thousands of times that. How is billions or trillions of watts going to be safe? Will it ionize the air on the way down? Safe power levels should be less than the intensity of our sun, otherwise imagine bugs under a magnifying glass. So, why not use solar cells? They are proven, yet still costly at about $20,000 to really do a house good.
The thing would make a wonderful weapon to control the population that is so naughty with that internet porn, encryption, and terrorism. We can't have citizens get out of hand...
This will be a disaster for radio astronomy. The iridium satellites were bad enough.
Actually, many types of rocks are radioactive (though something like, say, a spent fuel rod is a few orders of magnitude _more_ radioactive). There is actually a significant health hazard if the bricks and concrete in your basement are made from stone that is high in Thorium. As a part of its decay chain, Thorium becomes Radon, which is a radioactive gas (the heaviest of the inert gasses). This tends to collect in basements, giving you dangerous radiation exposure if you are exposed to it for years.
This has been happening for as long as rocks have existed on Earth.
Now, I'm not saying that nuclear power is without its dangers; I'm just pointing out that many rocks are indeed radioactive
Only as clarification, for the benefit of the under-informed: not directed at the original poster.
Old plants produce highly radioactive waste due to regulations, not inefficieny. The result of fission on U238 can be enriched, and reburned, repeatedly, until what remains is less readioactive than the granite under our feet.
However, the process that does this, can also be used for producing weapons-grade fissionable materials, and the NRC/DoE/DoD don't want that tech to be in the public sector.
It is NRC regulations that require that high level redioactive waste be burried in mountains, at significant cost, rather than used for fuel.
Consider the analogy of pig farming. You grow corn to feed your pigs. Your pigs make waste.
You can use the waste to fertilize your corn, and to produce methane. You can use the methane to power generators to make electricity. You can use the electricity to run lights, ventilators, water pumps and the like. You can deliver the water to the pigs, and to irrigate your corn crop. You can then sell excess corn to buy more pigs.
But, the waste smells bad, so the government makes you bury it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
The site is slashdotted already, seconds after being posted here. That has left me with a ton of questions.
I wonder how they are going to focus a beam with hundreds of megawatts of power in it down through the atmosphere. There are all kinds of engineering problems to overcome, such as dispersion of the beam in the atmosphere, reflections and deflections of parts of the beam by atmospheric winds, compensation for changes in the temperature and humidity of the air.
How large a target will the beam be aimed at? Presumably a field several miles across full of receiving antennas. The antennas near the center of the beam will receive full power, while antennas at the edge would receive only a few percent.
How do you keep birds from flying into the beam area, and what happens to people living near the receiver? Do you move all the citizens out of the area, and declare it a danger zone? How do you shield the operation engineers working near the site?
I think NASA is hoping to get a small pilot program up and testing in the next 20 years or so. There is a lot of research left to be done.
And the SimCity beam was one of the best. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
"And in the news tonight, Kiev has been microwaved to ashes due in part to a thruster failure onboard NukeMe II"
I have an Aerospace Engineering Friend who's senior project was to work on a team and research this sort of thing for NASA. He told me about it, and sort of scoffed at the idea because of some of it's prohibitive factors. To power Houston lets say, I believe it was going to take a solar array 1 kilometer long and 700 meters wide. This would require 1750 launches to get all this equipment into space. The costs for all this are of course astronimical. And then there's maintaining this array with chips of paint and such space degree zooming around at a few thousand miles per hour. Of course, I don't know where these robots came from, and his project was completed over a year ago, so maybe the solar cell technology has gotten a lot better while I wasn't paying attention.
fearmongering about nukes is unjustified, there are lots of plants running now w/o anyone getting "killed". Other than a poorly run plant in a collapsing socialist country having a graphite fire - all perform reasonable well. There's one just up the James river from me at Surry and it keeps my A/C running on hot summer days, not to mention it doesn't spew any greenhouse gasses. Nuclear is here to stay and grow once it gets over the unwarrented public fear of the unknown. There's a fantastic amount of energy in a little bit of matter (e=mc^2).
don't panic
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
That's somewhat interesting, but I've never seen the case study myself, and wonder what kind of control group they used -- maybe people who use cellular phones are simply more intelligent and imaginative and use phones because of that. My interpretation of what I was told (by an MD) was that the cellular radiation stimulates activity in regions of the brain where without the cell phones there would be none.
However, the nice conclusion exists, given this premise, that microwave radiation that misses the target and haphazardly strikes people will benefit the overall IQ level of the country. Maybe we should target some high schools and examine the effects.
Note: It has never been conclusively shown that cellular radiation increases the chances of brain tumours. I worked in a nuclear power plant -- the fear of radiation is greatly exaggerated, I assure you. Live in the average Ukranian basement for 8 months and you'll exceed legal Canadian doses of radiation (legal, not lethal :P).
Radiation becomes a problem when it is in the form is acute doses -- high exposures in a short period of time. Just for the sake of a story: a fellow came into the plant (the Nuclear Power Plant) a few years back and set off the alarms on the way in. It was surprising to discover that the source of the radiation that set off the alarms was in his belly -- a result of him eating Caribou meat over the weekend when he went hunting. The Caribou were eating lichen off rocks, and rocks are radioactive, and hence the Caribou meat was releasing enough radioactivity to set off the alarms at our wonderful Nuclear Power Plant.
No, people who find technology frightening are not, in general, intelligent. Mostly they are motivated by an impetus to slow down anything to do with economic expansion becuase they, in general, have not figured out how to participate in economic expansion. Instead, they like to participate in regulation of economic expansion. The criteria for an idea like this is, if you can get funding to try it, good for you. If not, oh well. The net effect of these so called concerned people is that it takes a lot of bakshish to third world despots in outfits like the U.N. to get anything like this off the ground. Seldom is any useful input generated. Finally, when concerned pseudo-geeks get it wrong, like with automobile airbags, they are seldom brought to account for it.
I wrote parts of this stuff
If my math is right, 1GW going into an area 5 x 7 miles gives about 11W/m^2. Elsewhere in this thread, it was meantioned that cell phones put 16W/m^2 into your head. Relax.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Am I the only one who thinks of the James Bond film Goldeneye? I know goldeneye used EMP, but this could be "targetted" to give varying amounts of concentrated radion to a particular point of the Earth's surface - it'd be quite accurate too, I think :-) Yet another weapon for the US to exploit....
http://www.jonmasters.org/
It will be safe. It will be clean. It will be too cheap to meter.
The taxpayers will fund the research. The taxpayers will fund the assembly. The taxpayers will fund the launches. And then when that is all accomplished, after the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it will be handed over to private interests.
Sound familiar?
Of course there is already an enormous amount of energy being received on the surface of the earth. There is already a huge nuclear generator in space beaming energy to the earth's surface. It is proven and reliable technology. But noone owns it.
The technology already exists to gather some of it. Much more could be gathered, but the level of research funding has typically been around $15 million per year. There just hasn't been much interest shown in it by the utilities.
What is the problem with that source of energy? The same problem that would exist with cold fusion. It doesn't have to be centralized. You can't channel it through a gate and make an enormous profit selling it. It doesn't require a gigantic infrastructure that funnels billions into private pockets. You can't create a Dependency with such an energy source, because anyone and everyone could tap it.
When you want to create a Dependent nation, maintain a heirarchy, you must control the resources. When you want to enrich private interests, you must design a gigantic infrastructure. And that's the sole desire that keeps such a boondoggle alive in the thinkers minds..
More science FUD. Last time I checked the facts seemed like the inevitable conclusion was that coal mining, and the subsequent burning of such for fuel, caused many more annual fatalities than nuclear energy. This analysis of course omitted the fatalities that were purposely induced in the 1940's and took place pre-Chernoble. I suspect that even if the Chernoble were included, that nuclear power generation would still appear safer in at least the medium term (next several hundred years) in spite of what Nader might believe.
"I believe the children are our future: nasty, brutish and short."
I believe the devices in question include radar guns (police were resting the 'gun' in their laps and consequently developing very... personal... cancer) and I seem to remember something about compact cell phones (where the transmitter is close to the head - btw, some cell phone units are capable of puting out more power but are restricted by Federal regulations).
The characteristics seem to be comparitively low powered devices held close to the body over an extended period of time.
Of course, there's a great deal of debate on these issues. I don't believe there are any conclusive studies pointing to why this happens (and even the findings that something DOES happen is under debate). But as thing aspect of RF damage comes more to light, it might be worth both mention and consideration.
I'm sure anyone who knows more about this than myself (wasn't there a /. post?) will oblige with a followup post. ;)
I think a Niven Ring (from Larry Niven's Ringworld series -- I don't know if he officially named it after himself, but it seems to make sense) would be a lot more practical. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I believe he worked out that if you take the mass of Jupiter, you could make a ring around the sun a million miles wide and a mile thick, with walls a thousand miles high to keep the atmosphere in.
Plenty of surface area there, even if it's no Dyson Sphere, and it has some other advantages: you can spin it for artifical gravity, you can have a smaller ring of evenly-spaced orbiting solar-collecting plates to beam power to collector stations around the rims, as well as cast shadows, creating day and night, etc.
I don't remember the rest of the details, but it was a pretty cool idea.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
One problem I see with this is that it's not very defensible. It's (relatively) easy to keep enemy nations from entering local airspace. It seems pretty easy, however, for a rogue nation to shoot a missle at our panels in the sky to cut off our power if we were ever to rely on this in a great way. Interception of something like that seems pretty tough.
Tesla had set up a beamed power transmitted on the East coast late 20's or so, but it didn't gain "popularity". Lets just see if the oil companies get someone to cap the guys in charge of this project...
My father's friend worked on one of the test facilities for quite some time... Fusion still isn't outputting as much energy as it takes in to start the reaction.
A while back i read an article (here, on a couple other websites, and in scientific american) about a new type of surface-to-orbit vehicle that worked by creating an air cone on top of it using some kind of dish and microwaves. The only thing stopping it from going into use right now is that there was no satellite microwave transmitter. They already proved that the thing works by using a transmitter on a tower above the device. Dunno if this beam would be powerful or tight enough to do it, but the possability exists and this was probably the coolest of the weird new ideas for single stage to orbit devices.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Some people just can't stand the idea of progress, increased wealth, and higher standards of living. These are the same people who would be concerned about preserving the pristine state of the dark side of the moon.
I wrote parts of this stuff
A minor quibble here - the amounts of waste produced are actually quite small. The energy density in nuclear fuels, even when burned in conventional, inefficient fission plants, is between four and five orders of magnitude higher than the energy density of fossil fuels. Correspondingly _less_ fuel is needed, and so you wind up with between 10,000 and 100,000 times less waste material than with fossil fuel plants.
Instead of a billion tonnes of coal burned to produce three billion tonnes of CO2, for instance, you'd get ten thousand tonnes of uranium oxide producing ten thousand tonnes of plutonium oxide and mixed nasty isotopes.
This is still not negligeable, but you could store this in a gymnasium with room to spare. Compared to a _billion_ tonnes of coal.
What we actually need is a reliable way of storing _small_ amounts of waste for very long periods of time. That, or transmuting it all into something with a shorter half-life (expensive).
Actually, there's more information about this at NASA, in an article entitled Integrated thin-film solar power satellite. It goes into more detail about the part we care about -- the satellite and its uses -- instead of the robot being developed at CMU to help construct the darn thing. It even has a couple of MacPaint-like pictures of what this thing might look like.
What about (as someone else mentioned) flying objects which end up in the path of the beam? Even if it would pass through us, it would get absorbed by rain clouds (making it just as effective as those solar panels we were all promised in the late '70s), or worse yet, by birds, airplanes, and other flying objects... Certainly, the danger of the solar collector crashing to the ground is less than that of an orbiting nuclear reactor or black hole...but it still seems a bit unsafe. For this thing to be useful at all, it's got to transmit multi-megawatts of energy from point A to point B, and that energy will inevitably get absorbed by SOMETHING in the area. And if the levels are low enough to be "human-safe," then they're barely going to be able to light a bulb, let alone run something useful (like a section of a power grid).
That's why NASA is looking at using these things more to transmit power to lunar bases, Mars missions, and the like. In these controlled environments, something like a giant orbiting solar panel make a heck of a lot of sense:
P.S. Anyone reading this remember when parts of your 'Net link were transmitted by microwave? Our link in college used to go down regularly, and a call to MIT confirmed that their microwave link to BU (or was it BC? I can never remember) was down due to rain. Sure adds another dimension to the concept of "Internet Weather Forecasting!" :)
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
Because I never actually used the microwave power systems. As I remember, for the money, they really didn't provide all that much more power over coal, in the end, you got more bang for the buck with nuclear. I don't recall using the gas powered ones either for the same reason. I always used nuclear (of course, I had disasters off and unlimited funds. Perhaps if I actually played for strategy instead of maximum population, I would have seen a need for microwave power.)