PJ Vogt

She'd then become a tenured professor at Berkeley, then to the federal government, where she'd work for an agency for advanced research projects in energy.

These days, she's a climate investor at a big firm called DCVC, where she invests in nuclear, among other things.

20 years spent on every side of this—academic, public, private—

I asked Rachel, as is the podcaster's privilege, to use her expertise to explain nuclear physics from the 101 level up.

Starting with this.

All nuclear power plants right now run on nuclear fission.

What's nuclear fission?

Rachel explained that in a nuclear reactor, atoms are split in a controlled chain reaction.

The heat this reaction generates then turns water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and the turbine generates electricity.

To Rachel, the exciting part of all this, when she learned about it, is what happens next, or actually what doesn't happen.

A nuclear power plant does not emit carbon, just water vapor.

The big environmental downside to this whole process, of course, is nuclear waste, which we'll get into later.

But that brief explanation of nuclear fission, how it works, just that knowledge, once humanity had learned it, was powerful.

It contains the seed of everything that would follow.

Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the entire atomic age.

Here is the story of how human beings first figured nuclear energy out.

Two scientists worked it out on a walk in the snow over Christmas week.

Lise Meitner, who'd fled Nazi Germany that summer, and her nephew Otto Frisch, who'd come to visit her in Sweden.

On their walk, they were talking about a letter he'd gotten from a colleague describing the results of a strange experiment.

He'd been bombarding uranium, the metal, with neutrons and noticed that something surprising happened.