Howard.Gayle@CMU-CS-G@sri-unix.UUCP (10/19/83)
death, I think it is reckless to pin our hopes on unproved technology or on systems where a single failure could be disastrous.
REM%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (10/20/83)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC> I think you are overlooking one simple fact, that we don't plan to supply 100% of our energy from a single SPS. In fact we don't plan to supply 100% of our energy from a whole bunch of SPSs. If we did, then if an SPS failed it's be death for a lot of people. But if we get our energy from many different places no one failure can totally destroy our electric supply nor even disasteriously reduce it. Present we get too much of our energy from MidEast petroleum, so when they cut off the supply we suffer greatly. But even so, we don't die in mass numbers. If 10% of our total energy was from an SPS, and it failed, the disaster wouldn't be as bad as the 1974 oil embargo, i.e. we could easily survive it. If that 10% from SPS replaced some oil imports, it'd mean next time here's an embargo we'd suffer even less than we did in 1974. (I'd also like to see perhaps 20% of our energy from nuclear power plants, again replacing an equal amount of imported oil and/or coal burning; coal fumes kill people and resultant acid rain kills fish in Canada and must be stopped!) So let's add one more source of energy (SPS) to our repertory, so we have more flexibility in response when one of the sources goes away temporarily (MidEast embargo etc.) or permanently (coal is outlawed). If it turns out in practice that SPS is safer than other forms of energy, perhaps we can increase our dependence on SPS to 30% or maybe even 40% (with more than one SPS up there and more than one rectenna down here of course, same as we have more than one nuclear power plant and more than one hydroelectric dam etc.).