Slashdot Mirror

Spot on for the wired telephone.

You missed Canadian Reginald Aubrey Fessende for the wireless telephone ;-)

        Who first used the word and the method of continuous waves?
        Who was first to transmit voice over radio?
        Who devised a detector for continuous waves?
        Who first used the method, and the word heterodyne?
        Who was first to send two-way wireless telegraphy messages across the Atlantic ocean?
        Who was first to send wireless telephony (voice) across the Atlantic Ocean?
        Who made the world's first wireless broadcast (voice and music)?

Fascinating read!
http://www.ieee.ca/millennium/radio/radio_radioscientist.html

Uhm, yeah, like Reginald Aubrey Fessenden or Alexander Graham Bell, etc. eh?

* Who first used the word and the method of continuous waves?
* Who was first to transmit voice over radio?
* Who devised a detector for continuous waves?
* Who first used the method, and the word heterodyne?
* Who was first to send two-way wireless telegraphy messages across the Atlantic ocean?
* Who was first to send wireless telephony (voice) across the Atlantic Ocean?
* Who made the world's first wireless broadcast (voice and music)?

http://www.ieee.ca/millennium/radio/radio_radioscientist.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Another example of prior art exists, and I quote from the IEEE article

One of the major improvements of Telidon over first generation videotex systems is its high-quality graphic capability. High resolution colour drawings, intricate shapes, even photographs are all possible through Telidon technology.

This was in 1981. In 1985 I did some work for a small Toronto based company, where they were developing both Telidon content and technology. I wrote a NAPLSP decoder/encoder written using C, lex and yacc. Everything was coded using a machine readable instruction set. Since everything was done using dialup modems, and 2400 baud was considered fast.

I also did a standalone NAPLSP server and browser that would display content. This was delivered to Xerox when they had their own retail stores in Toronto. It was commercialized to a certain degree.

There were several dozen public terminals in malls and other public areas in the city. It was a prime example of a technology that was a solution looking for a problem. Lack of bandwidth, and a lack of critical mass in terms of a wide spread adoption doomed it to failure. It was fun while it lasted.

It is regrettable that Michael Doyle had Microsoft settle with him. By settling with him, it gave him the war chest to proceed with further litigation. The concepts that he is claiming as his own, written up by Ted Nelson in Computer Lib (1974), and then became reality with Telidon (1981). Michaels patent is dated 1993. It is the interest of everyone to refute the patent by presenting prior art. Perhaps a Telidon terminal demonstration would be in order.

This guy

...and call it the NABU Network?

Phantom missed the title of first on demand service by at least 20 odd years.

I seem to recall hearing that, but I didn't want to claim it without proof.

The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.

Mmmm, without a working fusion power reactor design to compare, I can't be certain that will be the case. I'm not a nuclear power engineer, but it seems to me the inside of a fission power reactor is relatively mild compared to the inside of a fusion power reactor. The radioactive flux (for lack of a better term) on the internal components will be much, much higher, so we have little idea on how much radioactive waste a fusion plant would create. But again, we have nothing to compare it with yet.

Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off.

In theory anyway.

There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, ...

There are fission reactor designs that solve the thermal runaway problem, like the CANDU previously mentioned on Slashdot.

... but the potential impact of the technology is so great that we are foolish to not be spending more on it.

I'm not certain I'm completely in agreement with this anymore. Not that I want to shutdown hot fusion research, but I've been hearing this argument for the last 30 years and it's wearing a little thin.

Heheh... Positive control coefficient, and a moderator that doesn't boil away.

It was an *insane* design, bordering almost on the criminal.

And yeah, there are still more than a dozen of the damned things running.

<sigh> I know that the RBMK reactor was designed for three goals: price, efficiency, and plutonium production (for weapons). And since that didn't include safety, I guess the engineers got what they wanted.

I'm all for nuclear power. You can't burn fossil fuels because of price per MWh and emissions. You can't build damns everywhere, because there are great environmental consequences to those - and they're only practical where there's a large river. (ie. Hoover Damn powers a lot of L.A., but how far from L.A. is it, with resulting efficiency losses in the lines?) You can't build tidal, wind or solar plants yet, because the technology still isn't practical even in the parts of the world that energy is abundant enough to effectively harness.

Western Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and increasing its reliance on natural gas. Fine, gas is easy to manage and it's clean as far as fossil fuels go. It's also abundant in neighboring Russia.

Ironically, as Western Europe shuts down its reactors, Russia keeps on commissioning and retrofitting their pressurized water and dangerous RBMK reactors so that they don't have to divert any natural gas that would otherwise be sold to Europe.

As is usual with the policies enforced by environmental lobby groups, it backfired. Fine, the reactors in Western Europe are being shut down. And replaced with far more dangerous Russian reactors. Good work, you stupid long-haired hippie tree-huggers. (Ooops. I have long hair and I like Five Man Electrical Band, I guess I can't insult hippies.)

Before you moderate me down for saying that environmentalists are idiots, check out this link, which has to do very specifically with the Russian reactors vs. Western Europe natural gas fiasco. While environmentalists are full of great intentions, they're generally ignorant of science or the basic fundamentals of how a marketplace economy works.

Like it or not, nuclear power is going to be here for a while.

Let's encourage safe and responsible use of nuclear power, at least until something more practical comes along. Let's try to not ban nuclear power, but to ban RBMK reactors.

Let's see a day when all the running nuclear reactors in the world have *negative* control coefficients (ie. won't run without a moderator) and use a moderator that will boil off and shut down the reactor in the case of an overheat.

Back when I was in high school, I got a summer internship down the road from Ottawa at a place called Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This was the home of Canada's nuclear program, and is one of those rare things that makes me proud to be a Canadian. Canada still leads the world in civilian nuclear technology.

At the time, they had three big research reactors there - the decommissionned "ZEEP" (Zero Energy Experimental Pile, put out *one watt* of heat, built in 1944 for the war effort and has a colorful history), the vertical-loading National Research eXperimental "NRX" (since decommissionned) and the horizontal-loading NRU. All three were of the CANDU design, though the ZEEP and NRX were very primitive.

I was assigned to the NRX. Every day, I'd travel from Deep River to Chalf River, don my dosimeter, walk through the checkpoints and head to the reactor. It was great fun, helping out with experiments. And irradiating golf balls for increased driving distance.

There was a Commodore PET on top of the reactor, and it used to record and monitor the temperature throughout different parts of the reactor vessel. Then, there were the tube computers (no kidding!) with ferrite core memories which were used to provide more critical functions. (Semiconductors don't like ionizing radiation if the reactor leaked, tubes are a lot more forgiving.)

And, let me tell you, there's no feeling in the world quite like standing there, on top of the reactor, looking down 30 feet or so to the people below you, feeling the slight vibration of the pumps running all around, and the sheer sense of power in the room as the reactor below you runs.

Food was forbidden in the reactor buildings, because ingestion of bits of radioactive dust was an (unlikely) possibility. Even so, people did eat there occasionally, and I was no exception, though you become very careful with the geiger counters before you put it in your mouth. Because there was (officially) no food allowed in the building, there was no kitchen, so hot snacks were a rarity. Canned stew was a special favorite: the cans fit right into the (sealed) sample tubes. Drop them in at the top, lower them slowly through the reactor, and then retrieve them at the bottom. If you timed it just right, the can was nice and warm. If you got distracted, the can burst and you'd have to clean out the sample tube. (And no, this was not a good idea, but it didn't put anyone at risk besides those of us who ate the food, and we all knew perfectly well how the food had been cooked.)

I'd have gone into nuclear physics as a career if I could have handled the math. <grin>

My favorite reactor design is the CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's an elegant design. Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors. U-235 requires the added steps of processing and is also vulnerable for use in weapons.

The moderator in a CANDU reactor is heavy water; deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen. Deuterium is a rare but naturally-occurring isotope of hydrogen. It's ordinary hydrogen in every respect, except for the fact that there's a neutron in the nucleus. It's not radiactive (unlike hydrogen with two neutrons, called "tritium", which *is* radioactive). Deuterium water is heavier than regular water, simply because of that neutron in the hydrogen.

The heavy water serves as the moderator. It slows down the fast-moving neutrons coming off the U-238 so that they can sustain the fission chain reaction. Light (ordinary) water will not sustain this reaction - nor will no water.

Let's say everything fails. The computers go down, the control rods are all jammed out of the core, and the operators are idiots. A Chernobyl accident still cannot occur. It's physically impossible.

If a CANDU reactor gets out of control and overheats, the moderator (heavy water) can be drained away, shutting down the reactor. You can't do that with blocks of graphite like an RBMK reactor. With a CANDU, if there's a problem and the operator doesn't drain the moderator away, eventually a pressurized pipe will burst and the moderator will boil away. With no moderator, the reactor will cease to work. Since the fuel is uranium in non-water-soluble ceramic pellets, there will be minimal decay daughters in the resulting steam cloud. Which will be contained anyway in the concrete reactor house, which is held under a vacuum to prevent release.

Unlike Chernobyl, which drastically overheated. The solid graphite moderator began to burn. And still the chain reaction continued to produce heat, because the graphite moderator was still there... it burned for 9 days.

Let's take all those unemployed Chernobyl workers to see a CANDU or similar reactor in operation, train them extensively on it, and then help them build them to replace their aging and rickety designs.

Heheh... Positive control coefficient, and a moderator that doesn't boil away.

It was an *insane* design, bordering almost on the criminal.

And yeah, there are still more than a dozen of the damned things running.

<sigh> I know that the RBMK reactor was designed for three goals: price, efficiency, and plutonium production (for weapons). And since that didn't include safety, I guess the engineers got what they wanted.

I'm all for nuclear power. You can't burn fossil fuels because of price per MWh and emissions. You can't build damns everywhere, because there are great environmental consequences to those - and they're only practical where there's a large river. (ie. Hoover Damn powers a lot of L.A., but how far from L.A. is it, with resulting efficiency losses in the lines?) You can't build tidal, wind or solar plants yet, because the technology still isn't practical even in the parts of the world that energy is abundant enough to effectively harness.

Western Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and increasing its reliance on natural gas. Fine, gas is easy to manage and it's clean as far as fossil fuels go. It's also abundant in neighboring Russia.

Ironically, as Western Europe shuts down its reactors, Russia keeps on commissioning and retrofitting their pressurized water and dangerous RBMK reactors so that they don't have to divert any natural gas that would otherwise be sold to Europe.

As is usual with the policies enforced by environmental lobby groups, it backfired. Fine, the reactors in Western Europe are being shut down. And replaced with far more dangerous Russian reactors. Good work, you stupid long-haired hippie tree-huggers. (Ooops. I have long hair and I like Five Man Electrical Band, I guess I can't insult hippies.)

Before you moderate me down for saying that environmentalists are idiots, check out this link, which has to do very specifically with the Russian reactors vs. Western Europe natural gas fiasco. While environmentalists are full of great intentions, they're generally ignorant of science or the basic fundamentals of how a marketplace economy works.

Like it or not, nuclear power is going to be here for a while.

Let's encourage safe and responsible use of nuclear power, at least until something more practical comes along. Let's try to not ban nuclear power, but to ban RBMK reactors.

Let's see a day when all the running nuclear reactors in the world have *negative* control coefficients (ie. won't run without a moderator) and use a moderator that will boil off and shut down the reactor in the case of an overheat.

Back when I was in high school, I got a summer internship down the road from Ottawa at a place called Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This was the home of Canada's nuclear program, and is one of those rare things that makes me proud to be a Canadian. Canada still leads the world in civilian nuclear technology.

At the time, they had three big research reactors there - the decommissionned "ZEEP" (Zero Energy Experimental Pile, put out *one watt* of heat, built in 1944 for the war effort and has a colorful history), the vertical-loading National Research eXperimental "NRX" (since decommissionned) and the horizontal-loading NRU. All three were of the CANDU design, though the ZEEP and NRX were very primitive.

I was assigned to the NRX. Every day, I'd travel from Deep River to Chalf River, don my dosimeter, walk through the checkpoints and head to the reactor. It was great fun, helping out with experiments. And irradiating golf balls for increased driving distance.

There was a Commodore PET on top of the reactor, and it used to record and monitor the temperature throughout different parts of the reactor vessel. Then, there were the tube computers (no kidding!) with ferrite core memories which were used to provide more critical functions. (Semiconductors don't like ionizing radiation if the reactor leaked, tubes are a lot more forgiving.)

And, let me tell you, there's no feeling in the world quite like standing there, on top of the reactor, looking down 30 feet or so to the people below you, feeling the slight vibration of the pumps running all around, and the sheer sense of power in the room as the reactor below you runs.

Food was forbidden in the reactor buildings, because ingestion of bits of radioactive dust was an (unlikely) possibility. Even so, people did eat there occasionally, and I was no exception, though you become very careful with the geiger counters before you put it in your mouth. Because there was (officially) no food allowed in the building, there was no kitchen, so hot snacks were a rarity. Canned stew was a special favorite: the cans fit right into the (sealed) sample tubes. Drop them in at the top, lower them slowly through the reactor, and then retrieve them at the bottom. If you timed it just right, the can was nice and warm. If you got distracted, the can burst and you'd have to clean out the sample tube. (And no, this was not a good idea, but it didn't put anyone at risk besides those of us who ate the food, and we all knew perfectly well how the food had been cooked.)

I'd have gone into nuclear physics as a career if I could have handled the math. <grin>

My favorite reactor design is the CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's an elegant design. Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors. U-235 requires the added steps of processing and is also vulnerable for use in weapons.

The moderator in a CANDU reactor is heavy water; deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen. Deuterium is a rare but naturally-occurring isotope of hydrogen. It's ordinary hydrogen in every respect, except for the fact that there's a neutron in the nucleus. It's not radiactive (unlike hydrogen with two neutrons, called "tritium", which *is* radioactive). Deuterium water is heavier than regular water, simply because of that neutron in the hydrogen.

The heavy water serves as the moderator. It slows down the fast-moving neutrons coming off the U-238 so that they can sustain the fission chain reaction. Light (ordinary) water will not sustain this reaction - nor will no water.

Let's say everything fails. The computers go down, the control rods are all jammed out of the core, and the operators are idiots. A Chernobyl accident still cannot occur. It's physically impossible.

If a CANDU reactor gets out of control and overheats, the moderator (heavy water) can be drained away, shutting down the reactor. You can't do that with blocks of graphite like an RBMK reactor. With a CANDU, if there's a problem and the operator doesn't drain the moderator away, eventually a pressurized pipe will burst and the moderator will boil away. With no moderator, the reactor will cease to work. Since the fuel is uranium in non-water-soluble ceramic pellets, there will be minimal decay daughters in the resulting steam cloud. Which will be contained anyway in the concrete reactor house, which is held under a vacuum to prevent release.

Unlike Chernobyl, which drastically overheated. The solid graphite moderator began to burn. And still the chain reaction continued to produce heat, because the graphite moderator was still there... it burned for 9 days.

Let's take all those unemployed Chernobyl workers to see a CANDU or similar reactor in operation, train them extensively on it, and then help them build them to replace their aging and rickety designs.

On December 24, 1906, at 9 P.M. eastern standard time, Reginald Fessenden transmitted human voices from Brant Rock near Boston, Massachusetts to several ships at sea owned by the United Fruit Company. Fessenden concluded the broadcast by extending Christmas greetings to his listeners - as well as asking them to write and report to him on the broadcast wherever they were. The mail response confirmed that Fessenden had successfully invented radio as we know it. Technically, he had invented radio telephony or what radio listeners would call "real" radio as opposed to Marconi's Morse code broadcasting. Fessenden could truly lay claim to be the inventor of radio and he fully expected the world to beat a path to his door. Instead, he never received his due recognition, lost control of his patents and the ensuing revenue which made other inventors and companies immensely wealthy. Even today the Encyclopedia Canadiana does not give him a separate listing. Mention of him is only included under the listing for his mother Clementina.

http://www.ieee.ca/millenn ium /radio/radio_unsung.html