TEAC8. It has been been over 2 years since TEAC7 in 2015. We broke in the middle of the day to hop on St. Louis transit and see the eclipse in totality... I was skeptical we'd get there and took off with a couple guys to be sure to get there well before it started. And right on time, minutes before the eclipse, railed-transit pulled up where we were and the entirety of TEAC8 poured out to see it as well. (My congrats to TEAC8 organizers for pulling that off!)
During his introduction, John Kutsch talks about THE IDEA FACTORY. (Which I have not yet read.)
Another book covered in-depth at TEAC8 was SELLOUT ("Sellout: How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home").
...I have read it, and really did enjoy it. Found it impossible to put down once I started. It focuses on Jim Kennedy's (and John Kutsch's) efforts to start a Rare Earth co-op, and get Molten Salt Reactors commercialized in The United States. I had spoken to the author Victoria Bruce in Chicago years ago, and was happy to hear at TEAC8 she'd found my YouTube videos a useful tool when researching the book.
I think SELLOUT is a pretty good example of what I am trying to achieve with my narrative video work... drag folks kicking and screaming through technical exposition. If the characters and story are compelling enough, learning technical details can be actually enjoyable to people not already interested in the subject matter.
Also announced was an 840 page textbook ("Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium Energy 1st Edition"). It serves as a reference for engineers and scientists, and it can be used as a textbook for graduate students and advanced undergrads. This has been a work-in-progress for many, many years.
TEAC8 lectures and workshops will be public as soon as they are edited.
The conference lasted 2 days. Volunteers captured lectures in parallel with interviews around the hotel. As I type this I haven't yet even watched all the lectures myself. I'll be watching some of them for the first time while I edit.
(In fact, sync-ing is not editing. So you might watch some lectures before I do, if you sit through the upcoming raw footage.)
- Really don't have time to write prose.
- Would be speculative at this point.
...so hopefully I'll have some things resolved by time I share TEAC8 raw-footage of lectures with you. I'll give the fullest update I can at that time.
My next update needs to be private anyway (because of raw-lecture-footage).
Thorium Energy World
Wanted to point out how much I appreciate Andreas's post on the details of recent Thorium coverage...
https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-make-14265528
...I was pleasantly surprised to watch coverage move beyond Andreas's own channels and into mainstream press. Andreas shares some behind-the-scenes how-to on that.