sal wrote:

I have two naive questions about a space elevator..

They're taken up -- not settled, but considered -- in Brad Edwards'
NIAC Phase II report ( www.liftport.com/files/521Edwards.pdf ) and in
"The Space Elevator."

Storms: the prevailing ideas are a combination of (1) equatorial
location -- as you note -- with low incidence, (2) a moveable base
that could do some avoidance, and (3) possibly a true cable rather
than a flat ribbon for the bottom ~25 km. Nothing would eliminate risk
entirely, but it might be brought down to tolerable odds: we have a
lot of tall buldings and bridges that wouldn't survive an F5 tornado,
either.

Vertical E field: to the extent they can guesstimate properties of a
bulk material from what is known about CNTs, it looks like currents
that could be induced by E variations with height are orders of
magnitude too small to be a problem. By the same token, all the
recurrent schemes for running power to climbers through the ribbon,
tapping the E variations, or recovering energy from descending
climbers look impossible by orders of magnitude.

If you want to worry about E-fields, think lightning. While it would
be rare just as storms are in the likely locations, there's no
question it could take out the cable. My own speculation is that if by
bad luck the base *did* end up under a threatening cell, it would be
nice to have a battery of cheap rockets with trailing wire that could
be sent up from rafts a few miles out as "sacrifices."

All this is moot, of course, without the CNT or CNT-based material. I
think it's sinking in among space elevator fans that (1) the material
is a lot less of a slam dunk than Edwards assumed five years ago, and
(2) funds for tackling all other SE questions are going to remain a
trickle until the prospect of the material firms up. You can
brute-force or clever-finesse a lot of the challenges, but if the
material isn't strong/light enough, beanstalk SEs just won't happen.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com