0h45m40s10f 2004 Kirk Sorensen Delivers CD-ROMs of ORNL MSR Research to Dr. Per Peterson UBC TR2016a
Channel: Thorium Remix
Date: 24/04/2017

http://ThoriumRemix.com/ Well back around 2004 a gentleman named Kirk Sorensen had contacted me by email and came to visit us at Berkeley.

Dr. Per Peterson:
We'd been working on Molten Salt Reactor technology and doing some of the early studies of how salts might be used to cool solid fuel reactors.

And Kirk came into my office.
He had a stack of CD-ROMs.

On them was this compendium of reports from Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the Molten Salt Reactor program of the 1950s through 1970s.

And that was a treasure-trove. There was an enormous amount of very useful data.

He'd discovered a treasure-trove. This was going to change the world.

Kirk Sorensen:
When I was at NASA I finagled some funds to get those documents scanned. I made bunches and bunches of copies of CDs. For you young people this was almost pre-internet.

Yeah, we had it, but your website would hold about 20 megabytes.
CDs were really the only way to move around big data. Sneaker-net was probably the better way to describe it. 

I made these for the Secretary of Energy, delivered them in D.C. and send them to lab directors.

Sent it all out, to these different places just sure that they were going to get CDs from a random person and put them in their computer and study them extensively- all 5 gigabytes of them, and come to the same conclusion that I had and change national policy.

I mean of course, right? Nobody cared at all.

The only person who cared was Per. And I'm really glad that he did because I think he feels the same way about this technology that I do, that it's really exciting.