At Project Elara, we want to develop technologies that people can trust. This page covers a review of the safety of Project Elara's technologies and discusses what precautions we must take to ensure that our technology is as safe as possible. ## Possible dangers For modelling the atmospheric heating of the microwaves we start from the PDE first described in [[Numerical modelling of electron beams]]: $ \nabla^2 T = -\frac{1}{k}\left[\sigma |\mathbf{E}|^2 - \mu (T^4 - v^4)\right] $ We assume for now that we are analyzing a cubic volume of air with volume $V$ that is homogeneous. Numerically, we can solve for more complicated atmospheric conditions, but we will start with this to find an analytical baseline solution. ## Safety mechanisms Safety must come built-in with fail-safes especially essential. ### Power beaming control It is necessary to recognize that not all locations need to receive the same amount of power. Recall that the power density (intensity) is given by $I = P/A$, where $P$ is the power transmitted and $A$ is the cross-sectional area upon which the beam is incident. If we want to beam to smaller dishes, for the power density to still be safe, we will need to reduce the power. For this, we may simply dial down the power in the appropriate beams. Note: I'm planning for several types of receiver designs: - Massive circular receivers several kilometers in size, covered in rectennas: - Ocean-based receivers several kilometers in size, which are based off old oil rigs and can supply huge amounts of electricity that can power entire countries - Land-based receiver stations, which can be smaller (and as a result, only capture a part of the beam), but still be effective at distributing power to local communities - Medium-sized receivers (around the order of a few dozen meters): - Shipborne receivers (both powered ships and unpowered barges) that can dock to quickly deploy energy to coastal cities - Ground-based receivers of similar scale, which can power e.g. an apartment block and can be placed at the top of the apartment - Converted telecommunications towers/radar towers that have their radio dishes modified to support power receiving - Small, air-droppable & helicopter-towable receivers (a few meters to maybe 10 meters max) - Printed rectenna "sheets" that can be quickly deployed to disaster zones and rural sites - Power transmitter towers (may not be necessary?) to be able to transmit power from the largest receivers to other regions that can't host massive receivers - Skyscraper-sized power towers that have high-mounted receiver dishes which have secondary power beams (phased array or parabolic antennas) to beam power to areas further away (up to around 100km) - Mountain-based "beacons" that transmit power wirelessly from one mountain-top to another, crossing over high mountain ranges and reaching areas that would be otherwise inaccessible - Power beam "cables" that basically are microwave waveguides so that the power beam received from very large receiver stations (especially the ones at sea/on the coast) can be channeled to distant locations, where a secondary antenna converts the microwave beam to electricity ### Fail-safes