Rachel Slaybaugh

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.