Archive for April, 2011
2011 Calgary-Centre-North all candidate forum at Wild Rose United Church
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, Politics on 2011-04-28
A potted plant no more, Conservative Michelle Rempel joined (Green) Heather Macintosh, (Marxist-Leninist), Peggy Askin, (Liberal) Stephen Randall & (NDP) Paul Vargis for a very lively debate.
I don’t live in Calgary-Centre-North, but @harpsinyyc and @Oryxzen suggested this was an important event. Based on the audience intensity, it seemed pretty important.
| Green Heather MacIntosh |
Liberal Stephen Randall |
NDP Paul Vargis |
Conservative Michelle Rempel |
Marxist-Leninist Peggy Askin |
|
This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license. If you remix it, link to my original. If you post a remix to YouTube, be sure to also use an annotation hyperlink.
I don’t want anyone complaining that the applause levels don’t reflect reality. I’m having trouble with my video editing software SONY VEGAS, which crashes when I perform a copy/paste operation, so I’m stuck with a single audio track for this video. The single audio track is board audio, so the candidates certainly sound good. But the sound person wasn’t worried about accurately passing the crowd’s cheering and booing to the speakers, since everyone in the room could hear that quite clearly anyway.
Hey, you ask, SONY… Isn’t that the same company that just lost all their Playstation customer info to a hacker? And sent out CDs infected with Trojans back in 2005? They kill puppies don’t they?
I can’t speak to the puppy question, all I know is their video editing software as-of version 10.0c won’t let me copy/paste reliably. Copy/paste! (Final Cut X is coming out in July for $300. Good to hear.)
Anyway…
15 Minute Highlight Reel
If you don’t have 92 minutes to spend watching the entire debate, there’s a Calgary-Centre-North Forum 15 minute highlight reel you should check out. It may not cover everything, but what it does cover is pretty interesting.
TEDxYYC Video – Kirk Sorensen on Thorium
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Alberta, Calgary, Canada, Environment, thorium on 2011-04-23
On April 1st, Kirk Sorensen spoke to a Calgary TEDxYYC audience about the potential of Thorium as an energy source. Kirk’s TEDxYYC video is now available.
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| 0:50 | 0:50 | 10 years working at NASA, designing sustainable lunar colonies. |
| 1:38 | 1:38 | Almost all nuclear power on Earth uses water as a coolant. Some use water at 150 atmospheres of pressure, as needed to generate electricity effectively. |
| 2:24 | 2:24 | Liquid water at 300 degrees Celsius will flash into steam (taking up 1000x more volume) if a leak occurs. This is why today’s nuclear plants need large, expensive concrete containment structures. |
| 3:04 | 3:04 | Today’s reactors extract less than 1% of the energy stored in their uranium oxide fuel, and must be constructed next to large bodies of water. |
| 3:54 | 3:54 | Why not use molten salt instead of water? Liquid fuel instead of solid fuel? |
| 5:11 | 5:11 | Molten salt reactor feature: The freeze plug. Would have been handy in Japan. |
| 6:01 | 6:01 | And then Kirk heard about thorium, and things got even more interesting… |
| 7:34 | 7:34 | LFTR vs conventional nuclear power. 200x more efficient. Enough power to pull CO2 from atmosphere and create new “fossil fuels” from it. |
| 8:18 | 8:18 | Do we have enough thorium? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Holy crap, yes. |
If you find the LFTR concept to be as exciting as I do, then there is something you can do right now, to help accelerate investigation and implementation of this technology. You can help promote this video.
You see, this isn’t just any old YouTube video. It is a TEDx video. That it was shot at Calgary’s TEDxYYC event, and uploaded to the TEDxTalks YouTube channel means it has the potential be a TED Talk video. If this YouTube video you see before you has good viewing stats, then it may one day be seen by everyone who visits TED.com.
So please consider doing any of the following:
- LIKE the video on YouTube.
- Add the video to your FAVORITES on YouTube.
- Tweet about the video. Suggested URL: http://youtu.be/N2vzotsvvkw
- Share the video on Facebook.
- Blog about it, with the video embedded.
- Email the video. Consider people outside your circle of family and friends. (Federal representative?)
And if you’ve never done so, be sure to check out EnergyFromThorium.com, where other folks from all walks of life interested in this technology can learn more, monitor it’s progress, and see how they can help out.
2011-10-21 Update:
THORIUM REMIX 2011 is finally complete. This is my recommended video resource for learning about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (a type of Thorium Molten Salt Reactor). It begins with a brief summary comparing LFTR to Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR).