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Engineering America's Diverse Energy Portfolio

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My name is Alyxandria Wszolek and I am a senior at the University of Tennessee, majoring in nuclear engineering with a minor in reliability and maintainability. I could not be more appreciative of the Department of Nuclear Engineering here. I have been given so many opportunities and experiences through this school, and many doors have been opened to me.
Alyxandria Wszolek
Alyxandria Wszolek
Although I only recently accepted a full time job offer to work in the nuclear industry, I have been surrounded by it all my life and passionate about pursuing this career for many years. I have interned at Exelon Generation in BWR core design group, Reactor Engineering at Three Mile Island, and both Reactor Engineering and Electrical Systems at Nine Mile Point. I accepted a full time position at Nine Mile in Reactor Engineering. I am currently president of the University of Tennessee Women in Nuclear Section. I am also involved on a national level in the U. S. Women in Nuclear Communications Committee, serving as the Facebook lead on the Social Media Team. 

I always knew that I wanted to be an engineer. Engineers are the creators of the world we live in. Mostly everything you see and use throughout the day has been engineered in one way or another, whether it was designed, optimized, manufactured, etc. I want to do these things and I want to help change the world. That is how I came to become a nuclear engineer. We all use energy, and we take it for granted. But what would we do if we turned on the lights and nothing happened or if we couldn’t charge our phones or laptops? The demand for energy is increasing, more and more each day. Not only that, but there many countries that struggle with energy availability. Energy makes it easier to teach, create, innovate, heal, and develop. I believe we need nuclear to help solve these issues to help generate electricity in an affordable, emission-free, reliable way.

I truly believe that nuclear is the best form of energy production to supply large amounts of baseload power. Right now, our country relies heavily on fossil fuels, but when you look at the facts, nuclear is a lot more efficient. One uranium fuel pellet creates as much energy as one ton of coal or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. Nuclear is an emission-free energy source. Even moving forward with renewable energy, we will need nuclear not only for the transition, but also to provide the reliable baseload energy that would be needed to support. There is danger in relying on one sole form of energy production. A diverse energy portfolio is key to the protection and growth of our country’s energy consumption.

The above post was sent to us for NEI’s Powered by Our People promotion. It aims to showcase the best and the brightest in the nation’s nuclear energy workforce.
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