Reply to comments on "Radiative transfer over small distances from a heated metal".

Some previous works showed that radiative transfer between two closely spaced, lossy media diverges as 1/L(2), where L is the spacing between the two media. This divergent power transfer clearly violates energy conservation. The explanation for this unphysical result is that too many optical modes were counted in those previous works, and many of those modes are physically unattainable. Moreover, many physically significant optical modes were not counted in the previous works.