0191-9067/81/030219-06S02.00/0 Copyright ® 1981 SUNS AT Energy Council SOLAR POWER SATELLITES: RESULTS OF A PUBLIC OUTREACH PROGRAM KEN BOSSONG Citizen’s Energy Project 1110 6th Street, NW 300 Washington, DC 20001 Between January 1979 and October 1980, the Citizen’s Energy Project coordinated a segment of an experimental public outreach program on the proposed Solar Power Satellite (SPS) for the U.S. Department of Energy and the PRC Energy Analysis Company. The goals of the outreach program included sampling attitudes towards the SPS among members of CEP's constituency — mainly solar, environmental, and antinuclear organizations as well as local and state government officials, labor groups, individual “appropriate technology” activists, and some members of academia. The outreach program was also designed to pinpoint unanswered questions and issues of special concern to this constituency at a point early in the SPS’s development to facilitate consideration of these issues and possibly their resolution; and the outreach program was intended to experiment with a number of approaches for encouraging public participation in the review of a major technology while it was still in the most preliminary planning stages. The Citizens’ Energy Project (CEP) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt research and advocacy organization working on a number of prosolar, antinuclear, and communitylevel technology development issues; over the past seven years, it has issued approximately 150 books and reports as well as several newsletters on these topics. The SPS was one of the issues which CEP has previously considered in several of its publications and, as a result, the Department of Energy, in late 1978, invited CEP to coordinate a part of DOE’s “public outreach experiment/program” on the SPS. The DOE also contracted the L-5 Society and the Forum for the Advancement of Students in Science and Technology to also participate in the outreach program. It was generally understood by DOE and PRC from the beginning of the outreach program that CEP was a critic of the SPS concept while the L-5 Society was an advocate and FASST was more or less neutral. As the first step in the outreach effort, each of the three organizations was asked to develop accurate summaries of approximately 20 SPS “white papers” that had been earlier issued by the DOE on a range of issues and questions prompted by the technology. These included military implications, environmental impacts, economics, social concerns, and international aspects. Each of the three groups was asked to emphasize in their respective summaries those points and issues thought to be of special interest to their respective constituencies. At no time were these summaries edited by DOE or PRC or anyone other than those deemed appropriate by each group, respectively.
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