By Amelia Tiemann, published at 4th Generation on May 19, 2020
Rachel Slaybaugh is a nuclear engineer by training, but she has an innovative instinct that goes far beyond the technical. A key founder of the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp, a Berkeley-based program that trains students and professionals in skills essential to innovating in the field of nuclear technology, Slaybaugh is one of the most creative contributors to the nuclear field.
She has a special talent for enjoining skilled and creative minds in the spirit of collaboration, which has given the nuclear industry something it has never seen before. The Bootcamp brings together students and experts to design and pitch a complex but open-ended nuclear innovation project. It is the most unique undertaking of her career (so far) as a nuclear researcher with a penchant for adapting complex technologies for real-world outcomes.
Slaybaugh’s day job is Assistant Professor in the Nuclear Engineering department at UC Berkeley, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. Her research areas include numerical methods for neutron transport, reactor design and shielding, nuclear security and nonproliferation, and scientific software development. She also currently serves as a program director at the United States Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Slaybaugh started its fission program, which provides funding for cutting edge innovations in nuclear technology. She currently splits her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C.
Drawn to the broader impacts of technologies during her education, she chose nuclear engineering for environmental reasons. “I was interested in environmental issues, so when I got to college and learned that there are these existing, large scale, emission-free energy sources, I wondered why we don’t just use them as a way to stop using coal.” Her focus is computational neutron transport — essentially, figuring out how to get a computer to solve equations that tell where neutrons are in a nuclear system. She worked at Penn State’s research reactor as an undergrad, where she did educational outreach and eventually became a reactor operator.
I very much want to get plugged in as an advocate for the new nuclear power generating technologies. I am old enough to remember Alvin Weinberg’s work on a successful thorium reactor at Oak Ridge, TN. I truly believe that our nation – our world – should be on a war footing right now to reverse the effects of global climate change. We KNOW that burning hydrocarbon fuels is a principal generator of greenhouse gas. We don’t know enough to stop it. My best analogy is that between 1942 and 1945, the US built over 3,000 large and complicated Liberty ships to take the war to Germany. During that same period, we built over 3,000 technologically advanced B-29 bombers that carried the war to Japan. If we completed the design, production engineering, manufacture, and deployment of 3,000 small, modular reactors, we could put the solution in place in four years. Couple that with a Federal nuclear engineering cohort to operate plants that would be leased out to electrical utilities. By 2030, the US would lead the world in safe, efficient, and clean power production. If it is all done under a Presidential Executive Order, we wouldn’t even have to wait for action from The Best Congress That Money Can Buy.