Nuclear power needs to build up its workforce so it can power up clean energy
The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors.
The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen.
By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent and why many younger workers are fired up about joining the industry.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Craig Piercy: What I like to say is there are the lab coats and there are the hard hats, and so it starts from nuclear engineers and very highly educated and trained scientific and technical professionals, which make up, I would say, a small but important percentage of the overall workforce, but I’d say the bulk is in the skilled trades — pipefitters, welders, metalworkers, fabricators. And then you have all the indirect layers of employment beyond that, so supervisors, security guards, technicians, other people that are involved in keeping the nonnuclear parts of a nuclear plant running. So it certainly runs the gamut.
Meghan McCarty Carino: Tell me more about how we got to this point where we have this kind of gap to close. I mean, clearly the demand for nuclear is expanding. What about the kind of the supply of those in the workforce? What has that been like over the, you know, the near past?
Piercy: Yeah, if you look at the demographic distribution of the nuclear workforce, it looks like a double-humped camel. You have this prime generation that came into the industry in the 1960s and ’70s, in nuclear’s heyday. And then, of course, after [the 1979 nuclear accident at] Three Mile Island, you had a significant drop-off in the number of people coming into the industry. Then we have this younger generation who are late millennials, early Gen Zs. In our history as a professional society, in modern history, we have more people under the age of 40 than over the age of 60. So it’s this second generation that’s coming in that really is going to have the task of growing the workforce, bringing advanced nuclear plants online in the next 10 years, rebuilding our domestic supply chain that’s atrophied for 30 years. It’s a new generation coming to the fore.
McCarty Carino: What is attracting this younger generation? What can attract more of them?
Piercy: Yeah, so I think we see a much higher level of social consciousness among this younger generation. They’re not just coming in because nuclear pays well. They’re coming in because they want to do something good for the world. They have concerns over climate change, and nuclear really is, in many ways, a very necessary component to any successful plan to reduce carbon emissions. So a lot of them are coming in, to put it bluntly, to save the world.
McCarty Carino: I’m curious if there’s a tension there in terms of the image of nuclear, clearly a clean energy solution, but also an industry that has been dogged by kind of bad publicity, you know, nuclear disasters and environmental concerns. Is that still a factor?
Piercy: Less and less every day. And I think that what’s happening now is people are beginning to realize how safe nuclear actually is, how many megawatts of clean energy it generates. I think that if you look at public opinion polls today, and especially among the young, nuclear is much more favorable than it was just a decade or so ago. So in many ways, we’re leaving that part of our history behind us, and it’s due, in many regards, to the good work of the nuclear workforce that has been there, that have been running these plants efficiently and safely and really making it about the safest form of energy generation that we have in the world today. So that’s changed.
McCarty Carino: Where do you see demand going, you know, in the next decade or maybe two decades?
Piercy: We need to design, license and build a whole set of new advanced reactors. That will occur in the next eight to 10 years. We need to be churning out those reactors on a regular basis through a revitalized supply chain, so that by 2050 we can achieve that goal. It’s doable, but we have to start now, and that workforce has to grow significantly in the next 10 years in order to accommodate it.
McCarty Carino: Do you see the right signals in kind of the labor force in the pipeline?
Piercy: We do. We do see increase in the workforce, according to DOE statistics. There is a need for more, and I think one of the overarching challenges is the general lack of availability of, especially in the skilled trades — again, pipefitters, electricians, welders. There is competition across industries for those kinds of employees, and in nuclear we call it the “war on talent,” and the industry and the workforce is in some ways limited by that overall lack of availability.
Last month we spoke with professor Anna Erickson at the Georgia Institute of Technology all about the current state of the nuclear industry and the challenges to growing it.
In addition to the workforce, Erickson also noted there are supply chain constraints. Nuclear reactors generally use enriched uranium as fuel, and most of that comes from other countries, including a not insignificant share from Russia, which is subject to trade restrictions since the U.S. imposed sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine.
Well, last week, Reuters reported the Department of Energy announced contracts with six U.S. companies to fund the production of domestic uranium fuel for nuclear power.
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