ASEA ATOM (later ABB ATOM) was the supplier for units 1 and 2. Both of those units were delivered under budget and ahead of schedule; a very proud history.

In the 90s, ABB ATOM bid for the 3rd unit, but lost to AREVA. If I remember right, the year was 1992. The loss was the death knell for ABB ATOM. ABB ATOM went out of business, and I left the company and the industry.

But Wikipedia says that OLKI-3's history started in 2005in the Finnish government. What happened between 1992 and 2005?

p.s. As a side story, ASEA ATOM also designed SECURE. SECURE was an intrinsically safe reactor designed to make hot water (PIUS was the name for the sister design that made electricity.) They signed a contract to put a SECURE reactor in downtown Helsinki Finland for district heating. It would have heated the whole city in winter. But the final contract signing ceremony was scheduled for April 27, 1986, one day after Chernobyl blew up; very unfortunate timing. That was the death of the SECURE concept.

I just finished reading another article about counterfeit goods from China. Not just fashions, but sophisticated technical gear. Common sense should tell us that there is a black market for cell phone simulators that are sold to bad guys instead of government. It is hard to imagine how many of those things are hiding near FBI headquarters, the White House, NSA, and local law enforcement.

I'm sure that government could design phones immune to sniffing, but outside the military they probably don't. Given the FBI's record with handling email technology, I expect that a secure phone engineered for the FBI would weigh no less than 50 pounds. Government and law enforcement uses the same brands of phones as we do.

On a similar theme, I saw an article about a European device that alarms when it detects encrypted radio transmissions nearby of the kind used by their police. It could give warning of an impending raid.

If the heyday of Y2K remediation, I helped set up a push of a SOE to 275,000 distributed PCs in a weekend. It went off without a hitch. Management was happy, but the cries of thousands of employees who lost all their personal files and documents were ignored.

If you are willing to be heavy handed and brutal, you can accomplish miracles. Surely there is no news in that.

I can't resist bragging. We live on a sailboat. We have 200w of solar. Our electric use use is 0.6 kWh per day. 80% of that goes to our 12v refrigeration system. Is this a hardship? No, we live a luxurious life.

I confess, a big part of the secret is that we sail north in the summer to avoid the need for air conditioning and south in the winter to avoid the need for heating.

What is good for utilities is good for homeowners too. Investments in energy conservation have a much higher ROI than investments in electric production, delivery or storage.

I am a blue water sailor. I, and many others like me, would be happy to carry an ADS-B reciever onboard. That is, provided that it draws very little power, and that it gathers data unattended without my active intervention. Statistically, I think cruising sailors would cover a large fraction of the ocean areas of the globe. I believe the probability of a sailing vessel being within 200 miles of MH370s final flight path would be almost 100%.

The caveat being that I can not transmit the data to the Internet until the next time I reach shore and I can find someone who will let me plug in a USB device. That could mean a delay of months up to a year.

Would non-real time information be valuable? Thinking of the MH370 case, the answer must be yes. Not matter what the delay, the information is still valuable to someone. We could also record AIS signals that many vessels already transmit. I receive AIS from up to 40 miles away.

The idea could be etended to (symbolic) notes-in-a-bottle. A million floating ADS-B recorders would eventually reach shore, and some of them may have their data extracted and transmitted, then thrown back into the sea. Would that be worthwhile? Hard to say.

Memories of programming with the 6502 instruction set are so delicious that the only comparable thing to compare it to was my first orgasm.

I actually first did it on a General Electric GEPAC computer in 1966. It had an almost identical instruction set to the 6502, but with 24 bit words. Hip programmers expressed themselves in octal in those days.

Once again the power grid shrugs off this magnetic storm with a yawn.

But as soon as this storm has passed, a fresh set of scare stories will begin.
"The Power Grid Will Melt When the Next Magnetic Storm Hits."

Asy Ray to write it up in his blog. Ray will be the only one of us still alive in 100,000 years.

Yo quiero Earth.

The Federalist Society recently posted a podcast on this subject.
http://www.fed-soc.org/multime...

The issues, and unintended side effects of The Telephone Consumer Protection Act are more extensive than you probably imagine.I recommend that podcast as TFA for this thread.

The Summary says "Now kick that up to the electric company level, and give them a radio network that tells them which electric provider to get electricity from at what time to get the best (wholesale) price"

That's crazy. There are already organizations called Independent Systemm Operators (ISO) that run real time auctions to do thst function. They have been operating since the 1990s. No radios are needed. They have had high reliability communications methods for many decades.

Few people have working wind-up clocks in their houses any more. At least. It working day in day out. The sounds of ticking clocks at night was soothing.

Also soothing was the sound of the cuckoo clock cuckoopint on the hour.

Before refrigerators, we had an ice box. Under the ice box was a drip pan to catch the melt water.

All night long. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Instead of white icon lights and a chime, some pedestrian crossings used to have mechanical clappers. Clap slow to wait, clap fast to cross.

On a hot summer night when all windows were open (because we had no AC) you could hear those damn clappers clapping from all over the city.

Telling the factory men (and the whole town) that it was time to go home.