Fairly simple video to start: Lou Qualls shares his experience getting into Nuclear Power, and MSRE in context of ORNL testing many reactor concepts.
Lou Qualls is DOE's national technical director for Molten-Salt Reactors, and reactor technology integration lead at ORNL.
While this is Lou at TEAC10 (happening the day before ORNL MSRW 2019), most of my interaction with him was at ORNL, and in fact I've been pestering the poor guy on every ORNL related communication challenge I face since the 2018 ORNL MSRW.
TEAC10
Thorium Energy Alliance Conference #10 was a single-day event, and wrapped up with a screening of "Thorium - The Far Side of Nuclear Power" (again, an excellent doc).
Lots of assistance from volunteers for video capture.
One guy was running a massive camera and did share copied of everything he captured. Afterwards he said there might be a short clip of him naked on the SD card I copied. I thought it was some exaggeration of "I don't know what's on my old card..."
Not an exaggeration. Literally 5 seconds of just him stepping in front of the camera (while naked) to confirm it was working. So nothing crazy or disturbing, except not the sort of thing you want on your laptop screen on an airplane. Ha.
The venue did not provide any audio output from the mixing board. I tried using one Zoom to capture headphone-out from the mixing board... that was awful. (Anyone know how to make that work?)
Alan Medsker clamped his Zoom to a flag pole by a speaker, and pointed it at the speaker. The reason we have decent TEAC10 audio throughout is because he did that.
I don't have slides from the talks yet. I might not need them for everything, but I'm starting with Lou Qualls since he didn't have any slides shown.
ORNL MSRW 2019 - Presentations
In 2018 I was only allowed to capture a single talk (Kirk's). And ORNL seemed to be making a point of not retaining the video footage run through their video streaming service of the event, being piped to other labs.
You can imagine my frustration in 2018, and so I started asking for ORNL MSRW video data to be retained and find at least the possibility of making its way to the public.
In 2019, they did retain the video data. And ORNL will be asking presenters themselves if they want a copy of the audio/video from their presentation.
Hopefully participants will want a copy. It is out of my hands and I'm just waiting to hear how it unfolds, either from ORNL or from participants I know who are asked about it.
I was working my way down a spreadsheet of every-single-presenter (40 of them) and personally emailing such a heads-up, when ORNL stepped in and figured better they ask than a rando MSR keener.
Many talks were great. I have a few in mind I'm very excited about sharing. Will keep you posted on the presentation sharing. I have no video data, ORNL has it all.
China / SINAP did not present, nor attend ORNL MSRW 2019. So the latest info I've seen is still from 2019 SAMOFAR PDFs:
ORNL MSRW 2019 - Interviews
In 2018 I was allowed to shoot interviews on a balcony. Since then some security concerns were raised about photos of "the courtyard" in the background.
In 2019 there were 2 conference rooms we could schedule time in, but not permanently occupy either. It worked pretty well, in that interviews were conducted in a quiet room, us all sitting in chairs. Aside from getting booted out of the conference room when other folks needed to have meetings, it worked pretty well.
I'll try secure a permanent conference room in 2020 if I can. We never had to haul cameras in & out (just left them in the room), but some interviews just didn't happen because no where we were allowed to shoot.
Captured some great interviews. I don't think most stand up on their own without the presentations though... super-niche stuff without the presentation contexts.