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The Nuclear Energy Industry Posts The Help Wanted Sign

In a recent speech, NRC Chairman Dale Klein warned of the risk that the nuclear industry will face a shortage of skilled workers: "Every segment of the nuclear industry needs to work to increase the talent pool, though, so that we are not competing for a small number of candidates. If we all spend the next 20 years waving money and benefits at the same people, there will be winners and losers."

The competition for nuclear workers has already begun, and at least one company appears determined to be one of the winners. In addition to the usual college recruiting and advertisements in trade publications, it is sending interviewers to cities where its competitors have major offices. Employees of those competitors are receiving letters inviting them to come for interviews. Some people are actually receiving these letters AT WORK!

Readers should note that the nuclear industry requires workers from many disciplines. Take engineers, for example. The nuclear industry hires nuclear engineers, of course, but it also needs mechanical, electrical, civil, structural, and even materials engineers. If you work in an industry that is not doing well, you might want to think about switching to nuclear. For more information, check out the Careers and Education section on our public Web site.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
What about software engineers? While I don't know much about the details, I imagine that like all large industrial facilities, there's a fair amount of computer software involved, and somebody's got to write it.

My field of actual professional expertise is software testing (I'm a postdoc in the area), and I've seen a couple of academic papers related to testing of software-based components for nuclear power plants. One important issue here is the modelling of reliability of software components; some of the statistical techniques appropriate for assessing hardware reliability (testing a bunch of identical components to find the defect rate, for instance), don't work well in the context of software, and thus different approaches are needed.
Kevin McCoy said…
Robert,
Here is what I found from the web site of one major nuclear company. Out of 119 open positions (!) for full-time engineers, 13 seemed to be related to software engineering. Here's the breakdown:

4 instrumentation and control
5 software (unspecified)
1 code development
1 software verification and validation
2 supervisory control and data acquisition

So, yes, software engineers should have been included in the list.
Anonymous said…
Employment is at will. If one company does not compensate or treat their employees well, then I see no issue with other companies recruiting them. Supply and demand controls price. When business goes bad, companies have no problems with terminating large quatities of people with only a couple weeks notice. Power to the people!

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