PJ Vogt

Today in America, nearly 20% of the electricity we use comes from a reactor somewhere.

Tomorrow, we'll probably be using much more nuclear power.

What's happened here is that a group of people I was not paying attention to, nuclear optimists, have started to win the national argument.

I wanted to hear from these people and learn what they believe.

That's our episode this week, along with just a history of nuclear itself, how it was discovered, how society lost faith in it, and what its future might look like here.

I want to start with a person I spoke to named Dr. Rachel Slabaugh.

She first encountered nuclear energy back in the early 2000s, when public sentiment towards it was much more in the basement.

Wait, sorry, they have a research reactor at Penn State?

Yeah.

Great school, but also a great party school.

Yep.

They have a nuclear reactor at Penn State?

They do.

I'm sure there are more STEM-oriented listeners who knew all this already, but Dr. Slabaugh explained to me that there's about 25 American college campuses, mostly big schools like UT Austin and Kansas State, where undergrads futz around with small nuclear reactors, research reactors, learning how they work.

They're not producing significant energy.

You can't melt down the quad with them if things go wrong, but they're real reactors.

So you're working on a research reactor at Penn State, and like-

What's happening in that room with the research reactor?

This early time at the reactor would set Rachel on a path.

She'd get her PhD in nuclear engineering.