Solar Power Satellites & Politics What if?

You're making a very good point there.

One of the biggest subsidies for the US nuclear industry is the Price-Anderson Act, which makes the Feds provide insurance for otherwise-uninsurable nuke plants.

If the Price-Anderson Act was found unconstitutional/didnt pass/whatever, then you might have the lack of this truly massive public subsidy make the electric utilities think about backing a SPS, back in the heroic industry of the Space Age.

You still have the problem of 'put the solar cells on the ground', but this might see the US utilities get behind the project in the late sixties/early seventies.

You mean an act that charges $121 million a year per plant that covered $151 million , $70 million of which was over the Three Mile Island panic that killed not a single person ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act According to the IAEA the average accumulated radiation dose of the "liquidators" who worked cleaning up Chernobyl was about 100 mSv which is less than the background radiation in naturally high radiation areas in India and China during the same period. The evacuees had about a third of that in "strict control zones" about 50 mSv and 20 in other contaminated areas and around 50 or so people have died so far as they can tell. https://www.iaea.org/technicalcooperation/documents/chernobyl.pdf Both in Chernobyl and Fukamishi more people probably died from the panic than the radiation.
 

Ian_W

Banned
You mean an act that charges $121 million a year per plant that covered $151 million , $70 million of which was over the Three Mile Island panic that killed not a single person ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act According to the IAEA the average accumulated radiation dose of the "liquidators" who worked cleaning up Chernobyl was about 100 mSv which is less than the background radiation in naturally high radiation areas in India and China during the same period. The evacuees had about a third of that in "strict control zones" about 50 mSv and 20 in other contaminated areas and around 50 or so people have died so far as they can tell. https://www.iaea.org/technicalcooperation/documents/chernobyl.pdf Both in Chernobyl and Fukamishi more people probably died from the panic than the radiation.

Thats the one. Which became a thing because otherwise nuclear plants were completely unaffordable because insurers would refuse to cover the potential damage at other than ruinous cost.

Now, if the US utility industries are unable to get that, then they might be interested in signing up for a "something less than $10b" demonstrator SPS ... which drags this back on to the topic of this thread.
 
Wiki is wrong on 77W/kilo - right now, if you have the paperwork and USD250 a watt, Boeing's Spectrolab will sell you ITJs at better than 150W/kilo. This is a hell of a lot better than used to be available in the 70s-90s by the way, and theres more recent developments (google 'solar cell zephyr' and you'll see some interesting things).

Like you said, though, we're talking about the '70s through '90s.

Ian_w and At 250t, you're more or less talking about something the size of the ISS anyway, and you're also going to need to keep this ~250t in LEO, which is non-trivial. Fortunately, you have all this power, so assume a reasonable array of Hall Effect Thusters with regular resupply of xenon :)

That much is true. Though my impression is that HETs have not really been very well developed historically, at least in the West, so there's another cost.

Where you hit the problem is "Since l for microwaves is about 12 cm, and since d for GEO is about 36,000 km, well, do the math, it's not good." ... for this to scale up beyond the 250t-to-LEO demonstrator after you spent the probably less than $10b for the equivalent of either a very small natural gas to electricity plant\ that you hit your physics problem.

The only one I can think of is if some USAF or other wanted to build a large laser weapon system in orbit, and therefore supported this sort of solar array in space.

Don't think that really works - lasers in this time period are too inefficient, too massive, and too low-power to really work as a weapon, unless you count sensor blinding (and you don't need massive solar arrays for that). Even if you do convince the USAF that they really need an orbital laser array - and what bright young Air Force colonel wouldn't want one of those? - they would probably use chemical lasers.

Unless you drastically advance technology in general, you'd need to sell this as a long-run investment - really long-run. I mean, if you look ahead to the second half of the twenty-first century, I can imagine scenarios where SSPS's make sense - I don't think they're terribly likely, but they're possible. But this is really taking long-term planning to a whole new level...
 
Thats the one. Which became a thing because otherwise nuclear plants were completely unaffordable because insurers would refuse to cover the potential damage at other than ruinous cost.

Which the US government does for other big projects and makes a fortune on. Chernobyl was about as bad as it could get, the Soviets were, as usual , sloppy and they didn't even have a containment building. Even then it killed about as many people as a bad bus accident. Two of the generation IV reactors can't melt down or have hydrogen explosions. That gets rid of almost all of the risk. The Chinese have already scaled up pebble bed reactors up to 200 MW which is on the smallish side but decent for new technology and puts wind farms and solar panels to shame. Molten Salt has more potential but is only at the 100MW stage. Molten Salt reactors won't produce hydrogen at temperatures of less than 850 degrees. Keep it under that and you are good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
 

Archibald

Banned
OTL NASa and the department of energy did some serious studies about Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Glaser

The main problem was that SBSP was taken over by Gerard O'Neill and the space colonies and together they ran into William Proxmire which famously said "not a penny for this nutty fantasy"

It would be easy to butterfly away Gerard O'Neill and the space colonies: he was an astronaut candidate in 1967.
 
OTL NASa and the department of energy did some serious studies about Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Glaser

The main problem was that SBSP was taken over by Gerard O'Neill and the space colonies and together they ran into William Proxmire which famously said "not a penny for this nutty fantasy"

It would be easy to butterfly away Gerard O'Neill and the space colonies: he was an astronaut candidate in 1967.
So, keep O'Neill out of the project and discredit Proxmire (who has always been the bane of every space enthusiast)? :p
 
What would need to happen to have a prototype solar power satellite before the year 2000?

I have already pinned down a somewhat longer energy crisis in the early 1970s and a more politicized 'The Limits of Growth' by the Club of Rome. What other realistic things would be needed?

I don't think it is possible to sell people on an SPS prototype for civilian use before 2000.

What might be possible is to get the military interested in it as a means of powering remote bases. In that area, the competition is not ground based solar, coal power plants or even nuclear - it is gasoline and diesel that has been shipped over long supply routes.

To get it researched and a prototype launched by 2000? I think the biggest requirement is for the US to experience base proliferation in the 3rd world earlier than OTL. So maybe in a TL where the Soviet Union collapses sooner, or where the US wins the Vietnam war and is thus more eager to intervene elsewhere in the 70s and 80s.

fasquardon
 

Archibald

Banned
So, keep O'Neill out of the project and discredit Proxmire (who has always been the bane of every space enthusiast)? :p

My point exactly ! In 1975 O'Neill jumped on Glaser SBSP because he felt space colonies could become in-space factories and support infrastructures for SBSP.

Dissociate the two, and SBSP should be considered a little more seriously - although the technical issues as described by Asnys probably can't be solved with 70's technology levels.
 
My point exactly ! In 1975 O'Neill jumped on Glaser SBSP because he felt space colonies could become in-space factories and support infrastructures for SBSP.

Dissociate the two, and SBSP should be considered a little more seriously - although the technical issues as described by Asnys probably can't be solved with 70's technology levels.

Quite possibly they can't be solved with contemporary technology levels.

Proxmire can't be dismissed so unfairly, because his criticisms of the O'Neill proposals were actually quite justified. Even if the O'Neill colonies were possible with the technologies of the time--they weren't; even now, we do a very poor job of managing closed-system ecologies, to name only one area--their construction would have been exorbitantly expensive. O'Neill's construction plan began with the construction of a large moonbase. Of course he'd oppose a vastly expensive open-ended program that the United States was technically incapable of achieving. He was similarly hostile to the Star Wars program in the 1980s.

I'd love an archipelago of space colonies, anchored by solar power satellites, in space right now. Now is not the time for such, though, and the 1970s was still less.
 
I don't think it is possible to sell people on an SPS prototype for civilian use before 2000.

What might be possible is to get the military interested in it as a means of powering remote bases. In that area, the competition is not ground based solar, coal power plants or even nuclear - it is gasoline and diesel that has been shipped over long supply routes.

To get it researched and a prototype launched by 2000? I think the biggest requirement is for the US to experience base proliferation in the 3rd world earlier than OTL. So maybe in a TL where the Soviet Union collapses sooner, or where the US wins the Vietnam war and is thus more eager to intervene elsewhere in the 70s and 80s.

I like this idea - it makes a lot more sense than civilian power - but I'm not sure it's enough. For a GEO satellite - which it kind of has to be for a producing satellite - the product of the rectenna diameter and the transmitter antenna diameter is about 10 km^2. So if we figure a 1 km transmitter antenna - which is pushing the envelope of the possible - you need a 10 km rectenna - which is pretty enormous for a remote military base. Decrease either number and the other one goes up. And unlike the demonstrator, you really do need your rectenna to be as big as the beam spot size, because otherwise you're wasting power.
 
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