Nuclear Table Calgary Alberta 2025 Marda Gras - Nuclear Power

Fourth deployment of pro-nuclear table at Calgary Marda Gras!

This is a community street festival, and I registered to participate as a volunteer for Canadians For Nuclear Energy https://www.canfornuclearenergy.org

Gummy Bears were featured prominently at our table, because a gummy bear has the same volume as a nuclear fuel pellet, and so a "gummy bear" (of uranium) can displace the combustion of 1 ton of coal. We handed out little bags of gummy bears, which included a slip of paper explaining this fact.

We also sold T-SHIRTS. Each year the shirt experience was different:

2021 - Didn't know how to have inexpensive shirts printed. Sold shirts at-cost for $50 each. Sold very few.

2022 - Thought I could sell shirts virtually, by directing people to https://nuclear.myspreadshop.ca which resulted in a single shirt sale. The price was zero-profit-to-me, $30 each. So they were affordable, but no one at a street festival wanted to order off a website... people want to walk away with the shirts not wait a month for them to be shipped.

2023 - Successfully sold 14 shirts for $20 each (no-profit), out a stock of 16 printed in Calgary at Budget Promotions.

2024 (skipped)

2025 Sold 7 shirts for $20 each (no-profit), out of a stock of 30 printed at Budget Promotion.

Aside from sharing our knowledge and opinions about nuclear power, we had about 20 fliers. Ranging from United Nations ECE study of lifecycle impact of various energy sources, to vendor fliers, to SUFN pamphlets. (And the gummy bears count too, since they had an info slip included with each bag.)

If you're interested in hosting a nuclear table at a community festival feel free to contact C4NE or SUFN or myself to see if we can be of (non-financial) assistance.

For my community's table I paid out of my own pocket, as a fun thing I get to do once a year. Maybe one year I'll increase the cost of shirts to cover the cost of the table at the festival, but for now I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible.

In 2025 Marda Gras space cost $300 CAD, which is a non-profit price.

I purchased a tent ("Outsunny 10' x 10' Pop Up Gazebo, Foldable Canopy Tent with Carrying Bag with Wheels, 4 Leg Weight Bags and 3-Level Adjustable Height for Outdoor Gard") for $180 from Amazon Canada. That's been amortized over 3 festivals so far.

Gummy Bears are always about $100 (Amazon in 2022, Costco in 2023, Yupik in 2025).

General Advice:

Prepare the gummy bear bags in advance. It takes hours to put the info-slips and gummy bears into the tiny bags. Not something you can do while talking to people, and also would have looked kinda gross and not have been sanitary.

Contact vendors. Some vendors sent me fliers for free. Many provided PDFs that were not available on their websites. CANDU never seems to have a good 2-sided 8.5x11 PDF even, so I've only ever handed out my own fliers based on various assets.

Be ready to collect email addresses. I can now reach out to people and direct them to C4NE. Also, I expect a lot of local activism on the nuclear-front in the coming years. We just set out a pen and paper and it turned out to be invaluable.

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