Rachel Slaybaugh
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 8 May
Rachel Slaybaugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In high school, some Navy guy came and talked to us about nuclear reactors.
And I talked to my high school guidance counselor.
I was like, oh, what about nuclear engineering?
They were like, that's a dead field.
Don't do that.
I was like, okay, great.
But in college,
I got the opportunity to do a research thing as a freshman.
And it was just, you know, you interview some labs and they interview you and you get matched.
And I ended up working at the research reactor on campus at Penn State.
Yeah, well, I started out in educational outreach.
And so I learned all about nuclear energy.
And I was like, wait, a thing the size and shape of a coal plant that doesn't emit air pollution?
I was like, why don't we do more of that while these other clean electricity sources have more time to scale up?
So for me, I learned about nuclear and I was like, this seems like a very obvious environmental choice.
And that's how I got here.
So at the base level, fission is when a heavy atom absorbs a neutron.
And so the heavy atom is like energetically unstable.
And it's so unstable that adding a neutron...
provides enough energy that it causes that unstable atom to split into two pieces.
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