Thorium Energy Alliance Conference this weekend

The Thorium Energy Alliance Conference in St. Louis

The Thorium Energy Alliance will take place in St. Louis starting this weekend.  I signed up to attend long ago, but people are still joining right now.  Here's the link to the website.   I encourage you to attend if you can!

Much of the conference will be about molten salt reactors, of course.  But there will be much more! More than two hours of how-to-do-advocacy workshops, led by leading advocates such as Eric Meyer of Generation Atomic and Heather Matteson of Mothers for Nuclear. (I will be a co-leader in one of the sessions.) There will be great talks by many authors. One of the featured talks is by Victoria Bruce, and people who register for the meeting will get her latest book, free with their registration.  Sellout: How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring it Home.  Mathijs Becker will be a speaker.  He will be here from the Netherlands. He is the author of one of the few books debunking Jacobson's "100% renewables" claims (The Non-Solutions Project) as well as posting an excellent youtube channel, the Nuclear Humanist.

It will be a great conference.  But why should you come?

A Conference that is truly  for the "Rest of Us"

I have been to many pro-nuclear conferences, and I love them all.  Most of the conferences are sponsored by an industry group.

Sometimes, these conferences don't feel very welcoming to people who are not in the industry.  This conference feels very different.  Some of the speakers are from industry (EPRI advanced reactor group), and some are from industry start-ups (ThorCon, Elysium, Terrestrial and others). However, many speakers and attendees are "just" nuclear advocates. They are people who have never worked in the nuclear industry, but have a presence in the world of advocacy, ideas and books engaged with new versions of nuclear power.

The "just advocates" are the most important people at the conference, in my opinion.  They are the group that can reach out to other groups, and to their neighbors.

This is a very welcoming conference. I encourage you to attend.

Note: if you are defending an existing nuclear plant, you will be right at home.  You don't have to be a molten salt maven to get a lot out of this conference. For example, I could annotate the list of speakers, giving examples of the important and brave things various speakers have done in defense of our current fleet of reactors.  Look at the bottom of the conference page for the list of speakers.

Another note: The conference will include a break for Eclipse Viewing.  How many conferences are planned around something like that?

This will be a great conference.  I hope to see some of you there.   Here's the conference link, again:

Thorium Energy Alliance Conference 8

Advocating for Nuclear Advocacy at the NEA meeting

Facebook Post by Sarah Spath, Kristin Zaitz and Heather Matteson of
Mothers For Nuclear

The Conference

Each year, the Nuclear Energy Institute and North American Young Generation in Nuclear (NAYGN) jointly sponsor the NEA Nuclear Energy Assembly.

At NEA, Monday includes the  the NAYGN Professional Development sessions (open to all attendees, not just young members). The Supplier Expo and "Top Innovative Practices" awards are more industry-oriented. These more general events started Monday night and continued to Wednesday, according to the program calendar.  This year, the conference started this Monday, May 22, and ended Wednesday, May 24.

Advocacy at the Conference

I was moved to see the emphasis on advocacy at this conference.  In the NAYGN portion of the conference, there was an afternoon session on Effective Storytelling, described this way: Attendees will hear from panelists on effective strategies in storytelling and industry branding to explore new ideas in how we should be talking about nuclear energy and best practices in reaching a broader audience on issues important to the industry.

Wow.  I wasn't at the conference, but just this description stirs my heart.  And there's more.

At the main conference (the NEA portion, not the NAYGN portion), the president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Maria Korsnick, unveiled a "Wide-ranging Nuclear Advocacy Effort." This national outreach strategy will appeal to a wide range of advocates.   Here is a link to an article about her speech. But I can't resist one quote: "We have stepped up our advocacy effort not just a notch or two, but by a great margin."

I am so pleased to see this new policy. Nuclear needs a wide range of advocates.

Campaigning for Clean Air at the NEA meeting

I was not at the NEA meeting but my book was there!  Campaigning for Clean Air was given out in the NAGYN welcome packets. If you registered for NAGYN, you received my book!  NAYGN bought the book from me (bulk purchase with a discount) and distributed it.

It's hard to even write about this, because I am so happy.  But please understand, there was a lot of emphasis on advocacy at the meeting, at panels and announcements and more.  My book was just one part of the advocacy events at the meeting. But still: my book was there!

Mothers For Nuclear posted on Facebook about receiving my book in their packet.  I headed this post with a screen shot of this posting. What can I say?

 I can only say Thank You to Kristen Zaitz, Heather Matteson and Sarah Spath for their posting, and Thank You to everyone at NEA for advocating advocacy!