Related to the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima

[WA1GFZ]

Bill,
When the nuts have the bomb we will really worry. Nuts don't think like rational humans.
They will set one off in this country the first chance they get. MAD doesn't matter when someone is willing do die for the simple pleasure of blowing people up.

[wa1knx]

Bill,
      your right, nuke power is reasonable. one gram = 1megawatt for a day,
pretty darn good energy density!  Its a gift that the earth was made
up of super-nova star dust.  Frank, you are sooo right, yes they would
light one of those off here in a heartbeat!

[Tom WA3KLR]

Bill,

The Three Mile Island incident here in PA gave nuclear power a bad name.  I always felt that a couple of guys responsible for that disaster should have been hung in public by their scrotums.  The public will forget about it in time, like the Monica Lewinski affair.  There will come a time, perhaps sooner than we think, when we absolutely need nuclear power.  Nuclear power is a necessary evolution from oil to another energy source which, despite the hydrogen hype, does not exist yet.  The latest analysis I read about on creating the alcohol for fuel cells, said that the overall process of creating the alcohol is a net negetive energy process.

[WA1GFZ]

My Dad saw the Hindenburg fly over Hartford on its way to blow up. H is a stupid idea for car fuel Our present leaders didn't study history so we may have a chance to relive another mistake of human history.

France is full of nukes and they have no problems??? We need to shoot the lawyers and put the brains back in charge of this nation. 

[KE1GF]

Bill,

The Three Mile Island incident here in PA gave nuclear power a bad name.  I always felt that a couple of guys responsible for that disaster should have been hung in public by their scrotums.  The public will forget about it in time, like the Monica Lewinski affair.  There will come a time, perhaps sooner than we think, when we absolutely need nuclear power.  Nuclear power is a necessary evolution from oil to another energy source which, despite the hydrogen hype, does not exist yet.  The latest analysis I read about on creating the alcohol for fuel cells, said that the overall process of creating the alcohol is a net negetive energy process.

Tom yes I know all about 3 mile island, my cousin Jim was the president of the company when it happened. His wife Pam made it up for Dad's funeral. Last time I spoke with Jim back in 2002 he said that they're winding down the place and topping it off with concrete.

No doubt they messed up big time... not really a "disaster" though, no real reson for me to recap what happened, most was containted. I think they did bleed off some gas, it really doesn't matter, lesson learned. The other reactors at 3.M.I have an immaculate operational record.

-Bill 'GF

[Jim, W5JO]

thats cool bill, I'd like to see that.   I saw trinity site several years ago, and I
picked up a handful of trinitite.  I  have it in a glass jar, it is still hot.
my geiger counter ticks away when I put the probe in the jar.  The
crater from the blast is huge, but more like a depression than a
meteor crater. the steel shield that wasn't used is still there. worth
the trip to see it. its open twice a year.

As I recall, there are signs that say not to pick up trinitite or anything at the site.  I am curious as to how you got it out?

[wa1knx]

hi Jim,
       I follwed the kids, who were scoping out the stuff (no doubt at
dad/mon suggestion;) its mostly gone. I got a half dozen pieces+, careful
not to ingest any dust, breath any dust etc. I held them in my hand and
walked out.  They are HOT in your hand, a warming sensation from the sparse stuff chucking out neutrons.  I wrapped them up in foil, and put them in my trunk, then washed my hands, shoes etc off.
       as mentioned, in the NM area you can get neclaces and jewelry made up of it!  I stopped at one of them, a girl was trying on a neclace and I advised her not to wear it!!

[Jim, W5JO]

Unbelievable.  Not too many years ago, they watched you and would prevent anyone from removing material from the site.  I JUST can't believe anyone would wear jewlery made of the stuff.  Although, I guess the half life is nearly expired.

[KE1GF]

Bill,
There will come a time, perhaps sooner than we think, when we absolutely need nuclear power.  Nuclear power is a necessary evolution from oil to another energy source which, despite the hydrogen hype, does not exist yet.  The latest analysis I read about on creating the alcohol for fuel cells, said that the overall process of creating the alcohol is a net negetive energy process.

Yes Tom, people like myself and you, that have taken and understand the concepts of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, or even just newtonian mechanics. And even people that havent, know that you can't get a 100% yeild on any energy conversion. People are so hyped up about fuel cell powered or battery powered electric cars, but there is one problem that these people don't realize. It takes so much energy (electricity) to make hydrogen or charge a battery. Where is this energy going to come from? Oil, natural gas, coal? hydro-electric is good but it destroys the natural environment. Windmill farms are good and so are solar panels but they depend on the weather... were still stuck with a catch 22 on most of these energy sources.

A lot of people don't like G. W. Bush, but back in his first term he was trying to get nuclear power going again, but nobody will build a new plant. All of the plants that were built are getting old and there licenses to operate are expiring, which is the safe thing to do. But we're not building new plants to replace the old ones...

Now over in the old eastern block countries which were part of USSR are still operating reactors which are very old and truely need to be decomissioned, not to mention that they are designed to make bomb material. So if these plants lose coolant they still continue to react, just like what happend at chernobly. They messed up by running an experiment when they knew that the reactor would become unstable inherently by design, but they did it anyway. They blew the lid of the reactor, and seeing that the unit was graphite moderated it continuted to react, the fuel and moderator melted together and it's still burning today. They just dumped stuff on it to cover it up, You can bet there's going to be more nuclear disasters over there.

I'm pretty sure that nuclear power is so washed up in the US that the training unit that I observed is just sitting there, I don't even think that they offer a major or any NRC certifications anymore.

It's a sad thing that we're throwing away such an excellent energy source. All people are paying now for the decisions they make by preventing a nuclear power revival. These people are hypocrits, they wine about the cost of gas at the pump, how much it costs to fill their oil tanks during the winter, how much their electric bill is and the impact of the environment from the use of fossil fuels comming out their tail-pipe, but they won't let people who know how to solve the problem do the right thing.

Instead we choose to be puppets to OPEC, all we're doing in the middle east is getting ourselves involved in a big mess. I can't even pick up the town paper without having the trash being shoved in my face from that armpit, cause they're sitting on an obsolete non-renewable energy source.

We could literally wipe our butts with energy if we were to bring nuclear power back to life, take the depleted fuel, not bomb grade stuff (cause our plants don't make it) and bury it very deep underground were it wouldn't have any impact, instead of sucking it out of the ground and spewing it into our atmosphere.

Society is just plain stupid...

For those who don't know whats going to happen, this is a good place to start: http://www.dieoff.org

Well we've made the bed for our children to sleep in, I hope they enjoy it.

It's saddening that the people in power are using tactics for their buisness and lifestyles that come from the philosophy of a samurai, to make this conversation full circle going back to the original topic, think who will be getting bombed next.

Peace,
-Bill 'GF

[WA1GFZ]

Bill,
Well put!
"follow the money"
find the greed
The down fall of Rome came from the inside

[wa1knx]

Bill,
     nice write.  physics is really interesting isn't it!  all energy ultimately
came/comes from nuclear actions, including the hurling of the planets
stars etc.  so you can't "make" energy, w/o nuclear action. but you
can harvest it once created. ie we use stored sunlight called coal, oil, wind. we are *lucky* enough to have been made of the heavy elements
to have the ability to use nuclear power.  geothermal is another gift
of natural fission reaction heating the core of the earth. (this size
planet would have cooled off eons ago w/o the heat from radioactive
decay)
     btw china is begining a plan to put up wind generators, estimated to
deliver 1,000,000 KW by 2020!  I commend them!!  the environmentalists (or just mentalists were crabbing about the tiny wind system off the cape in MA.  can't beat wind for a clean source of energy!
    there are plenty of ideas to capture energy, theres gravitaional potential energy (GPE) of the ocean currents, vertical wise.
    back to fusion, there was an article a few months ago about
a small accelerator type hydrogen fusion generator making positive
energy!  all these kinds of developments takes time, too bad we
didn't try HARD in 1974 to attempt some of them. we might be sitting pretty now..

[K1JJ]

Interesting, Bill -

Here's some science fiction that makes me think... According to the book "Hyperspace", we have not even hit stage one of the three stages of civilization technology evolution.  The book measures a civilization's progress on how they get their energy.

Stage one is when we finally mine energy directly from the center of the Earth.  How do we harness the incredible heat down deep?

Stage two is when we harness energy directly from the sun - its plasma and core.

Stage three is when we harness energy from the center of the galaxy - within the black hole.

In order to travel close to the speed of light, he feels we will need to be in the stage 3 class, as the energy from the sun is not enough... :-)

He also said that if we were to take a tour through the universe looking at civilizations, most all would be dead. They usually destroy themselves through war, poison or kill off themselves somehow before even reaching stage one. This is the most dangerous era, before stage one..

Back to reality.  I am a proponent  of nuclear power, hands down.

Back to Sci-fi... If it were safe and secure, I would even like to see every household with their own personal mini nuclear reactor. Maybe sealed in a titanium box that was taper proof, somehow. Every car would be nuclear powered with a reactor and steam generator the size of an engine today.  Fantasy, but maybe someday as we get more desperate for energy and the security problems are failsafe. [terroist, meltdown and waste disposal problems.. :-)]

T

[KE1GF]

Well tom this is the fun part of the conversation.

What was science fiction is now science future.

Our energy infrastructure is pretty good, no real need for everybody to have their own plant in the basement, yet.

The electric car technology is definitily there, it has been for a long time (charge capacity, time for recharge, etc). You never hear or see anything about it cause it's scooped up by the big 3.

These would be best suited for commuting, 45 minute trip in the morning, recharge, 45 minutes home, recharge to go to walmart or the supermarket or whatever. This kind of travel is the most polluting and inefficient for gasoline powered cars, stop and go. Everybody owns a gasoline auto, my V6 tacoma is pretty lousy in these conditions, so everybody can relate to this.

Well what happens if you want to come up to hosstraders from Conn? 15 minute recharge every 45 minutes? I'm thinking mag-lev bullet train, maybe they could even drive your car into the train as freight for the trip... who knows?

Everybody should be involved in this conversation, even very young children have good ideas about how we can evolve from fossil fuels.

There's really no right or wrong answer, we just mutually agree that we need to stop using fossil fuels.

As homework for this converstation, forget that we have fossil fuels for a moment and ask your children how we could go about our lives without being chained to the pump...

Most adults cant do this cause they don't dream and imagine anymore, but we have a vast majority of fruitful minds here. Everybody please participate, hands down it's our world that we're living in share your ideas.

lets relate this to the drivers I design for class-E rigs. Conventonally people are plugging in a power-supply that converts 120V AC to 13.8V DC linearly lousy efficiency but quiet (switchers can be quiet too but the manufacturers cheap out to say afloat). Then they use the 13.8V to run a rice-box tranceiver, which has a linear PA most likely class-B 50% efficent which produces a nice sine-wave. Then they drive their MOSFETs with a lossy tapped-tank circut that waveshapes and phase-shifts the current drawn to switch the FETs on and off. That drive is used to drive a driver which has it's own (approximately) 45 volt power-supply, finally a sine-wave reaches the final FETs which is continuously differentiable, there is current drawn continuously... Power is wasted at each stage, you can beat the laws of physics.

Now the truth comes out, is class-E really more efficient in this manor than a tube rig? absolutely not, I can run the numbers if anybody whishes to argue.

To keep it simple, lets just say that a few of us are working on our own individual pieces to make a dyno supreme transmitter. I don't want to discourage anybody from building, and the stuff that we're making isn't easy to build and the concepts are even harder to grasp, but the day is comming soon when my big rig here will be like the old spark gap at the ARRL HQ...

Peace,
-Bill 'GF

[KE1GF]

    back to fusion, there was an article a few months ago about
a small accelerator type hydrogen fusion generator making positive
energy!  all these kinds of developments takes time, too bad we
didn't try HARD in 1974 to attempt some of them. we might be sitting pretty now..

Well Dean we do have nuclear fusion, it's called the hydrogen bomb, instead of calling it an atomic bomb they call it a thermo-nuclear bomb. A fusion bomb that's detonated by a nuclear bomb, detonated by a conventional bomb.

We've got our heads shoved up our a$$es, just think, the worlds most powerful computers are running simulations on how to make better bombs instead of working towards how to contain and control a fusion reaction...

What is wrong with this picture?

Regards,
-Bill 'GF

[KE1GF]

Bill,
     nice write.  physics is really interesting isn't it!  all energy ultimately
came/comes from nuclear actions, including the hurling of the planets
stars etc.  so you can't "make" energy, w/o nuclear action. but you
can harvest it once created. ie we use stored sunlight called coal, oil, wind. we are *lucky* enough to have been made of the heavy elements
to have the ability to use nuclear power.  geothermal is another gift
of natural fission reaction heating the core of the earth. (this size
planet would have cooled off eons ago w/o the heat from radioactive
decay)
     btw china is begining a plan to put up wind generators, estimated to
deliver 1,000,000 KW by 2020!  I commend them!!  the environmentalists (or just mentalists were crabbing about the tiny wind system off the cape in MA.  can't beat wind for a clean source of energy!
    there are plenty of ideas to capture energy, theres gravitaional potential energy (GPE) of the ocean currents, vertical wise.
    back to fusion, there was an article a few months ago about
a small accelerator type hydrogen fusion generator making positive
energy!  all these kinds of developments takes time, too bad we
didn't try HARD in 1974 to attempt some of them. we might be sitting pretty now..

Well dean just to make a breif point most of the time by rapid oxidation we convert mass into energy, combustion. Friction in the case of fission reactions to heat water. We do have some very simple household items that do convert energy into mass. Consider the simple household item, the light bulb or more intrestingly the fluorescent light bulb and the semiconductor LASER.

well we know E = MC^2 for the resting mass not including any kinetic energy.

and E^2 = M^2C^4 + P^2C^2 for total energy, P being momentum.. Mass X Velocity

and also E = H x C / (Lamda)

Remember that energy and momentum are always conserved, no matter what.

Silly as it seems mass and energy are the same thing!

For a simple experiement, place a laserpointer with a semiconductor laser and a drycell in zero gravity, what do you have? a rocket...

Engergy in the drycell is being converted into photonic mass with kinetic engergy by the LASER, engergy and momentum are conserved, light comes out of the laser, the pointer loses energy (mass), light goes one way the pen goes the other way... nifty eh?

We're getting there, we just don't realize it.

When my physics 3 professor told us in lecture that the class would be fun, he really meant it.

[wa1knx]

hi Bill,
         ya its fun. compress a spring, and it gets heavier from the energy you put in it. pick something up, it gets more mass from the gravitational potential energy you put in it.  I was about to enter how much time you slow down while driving at 60mph in your car relative to someone standing. or how much time speeds up going up a tall building relative
to someone on the ground,  by reduced gravity. however the compiler
i'm using now doesn't support h floating point.
        you would really enjoy a trip to new mexico, atomic museum, las alamos, go when trinity site is open. one of the museums has films of
the really big block busters they lit off, including in russias!

[KE1GF]

hi Bill,
         ya its fun. compress a spring, and it gets heavier from the energy you put in it. pick something up, it gets more mass from the gravitational potential energy you put in it.  I was about to enter how much time you slow down while driving at 60mph in your car relative to someone standing. or how much time speeds up going up a tall building relative
to someone on the ground,  by reduced gravity. however the compiler
i'm using now doesn't support h floating point.
        you would really enjoy a trip to new mexico, atomic museum, las alamos, go when trinity site is open. one of the museums has films of
the really big block busters they lit off, including in russias!

Dean you need to learn to use an arbitrary precision floating point number (GNU Numeric for C) or Scheme has always had arbitrary reals...
My AMD 64 has a true 128 bit floating point execution unit, using two 64 bit registers. I've got licenses here for SUN Solaris 10 x64 and also MS XP x64, should be lots of fun even know the software isn't there yet to use 128bit FP numbers. There will be a drastic improvement on 64 bit floating-point calculations.

I need to go out and get a book on GCC for x64 that'll be my girlfriend for a few weeks

It'll be interesting writing a hello-world with a sizeof(double) it should return 16 and sizeof(double double) 32.
sizeof(float) will be 8 unlike the old IA32, lots of money to be made porting software. like you were doing.

I haven't looked into the ISA of the x64, although it still executes code way back to the 8086, hopefully they've added a mode that allows for a true flat space 64 bit virtual address pointer, eventually I'm hoping that they'll take the bag off of the side of the x64 architecture, the chips will be cheap, run cooler etc... Kinda like a PowerPC except that it's CISC.

-Bill 'GF

[KC4ALF]

I recently rescued two AN/APR4Y Panoramic Airborne Recievers and their related Tuning units from a dumpster of a recent Silent Key.
These were part of the B-29 Radio setup and are marked 1944 Mfg.
The tuning unit 's I am trying to get working cover the six meter and two meter bands FM-AM.
A good lesson was learned at H/N, to wit: If you do not wish to glow in the dark do not attack our Battleships!
Modern translation, Leave us alone we will fry you.

[wa1knx]

>>Dean you need to learn to use an arbitrary precision floating point number (GNU >>Numeric for C) or Scheme has always had arbitrary reals...

wha, me haf to learn dis? na, you be young massa at math, I have paved
way. you makka all the new discoveries!  eye interested floating points only
on young babes at my mathaaamatic pool in az. website say, "let masta solve all
your complex problems, a solution will be at hand soon!"
 

[KE1GF]

>>Dean you need to learn to use an arbitrary precision floating point number (GNU >>Numeric for C) or Scheme has always had arbitrary reals...

wha, me haf to learn dis? na, you be young massa at math, I have paved
way. you makka all the new discoveries!  eye interested floating points only
on young babes at my mathaaamatic pool in az. website say, "let masta solve all
your complex problems, a solution will be at hand soon!"
 

Okay, sounds like a plan OM, retreat to AZ and grow your "foo man choo."

Teehee

[Bill, KD0HG]

I recently rescued two AN/APR4Y Panoramic Airborne Recievers and their related Tuning units from a dumpster of a recent Silent Key.
These were part of the B-29 Radio setup and are marked 1944 Mfg.

Dude, as soon as I kick the bucket you're more than welcome to dive in the dumpster here, too!!