The newest era of workforce development at ANS

The impetus for the American Nuclear Society to wade into the world of certification started with ANS past president Steven Arndt (2022–2023). He envisioned ANS alongside credential-providing organizations like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Society for Quality, eventually becoming the center of a variety of critical nuclear-related workforce accreditations.

To see that vision through, Arndt formed the President’s Special Committee on Certification, which comprises three subcommittees: one focused on certification, one focused on certificates, and one focused on auditing to ensure the maintenance of accreditation. At this year’s Annual Conference, the committee was formalized into the newest standing committee of ANS, representing the Society’s continued dedication to further developing its role in this area of workforce development.

Certification vs. certificate

The differences between certification and certificates are significant enough that they require two separate subcommittees. Certifications exist to demonstrate that the test taker has a specific knowledge or skill set. By requiring prerequisites to sit for the exams, certifications also serve to communicate that someone has a standardized level of experience. Certifications also require renewal and as such communicate an up-to-date understanding of the industry.

Certificates, on the other hand, are a one-and-done learning experience with no barriers to entry that do not require regular renewals.

By endeavoring to create a portfolio of offerings that includes both certificates and certifications, ANS can cater to varying educational needs and experience levels.

The committee started the work Arndt tasked them with by examining the existing field of nuclear certifications and certificates. They found very few—most of which require a high level of education or experience to sit for. Things like the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam for nuclear or the Certified Health Physicist exam, for example, are far beyond the scope of the average nuclear worker’s industry knowledge.

So the committee got to work on ANS’s inaugural certification offering, the Certified Nuclear Professional (CNP) exam, tailored to early- to mid-career professionals with at least two years of industry experience.

The committee then turned its attention to certificates, sending out a survey in 2023 that sought to find out what kind of information and skills industry professionals used in their day-to-day work and what challenges they faced. From that survey, which received several thousand responses, the committee identified the largest gap that the industry is currently facing: a significant barrier to entry.

“There are lots of really talented people who have technical knowledge that could be very beneficial to the industry, but they don’t really understand all the unique aspects of nuclear,” explained Rebecca Steinman, senior licensing manager at Constellation Nuclear and chair of the Certification and Workforce Development Committee.

She and her fellow committee members concluded that the answer to overcoming that barrier was creating NUC101: a certificate course that over the span of a few days would give those unfamiliar with the industry a working understanding of the nuclear field’s most important aspects.

Workforce focus

A sample of the materials from the “Nuclear Fundamentals” presentation.

From rapid innovation and progress in the advanced reactor space to bills being introduced at the state level nationwide to massive investments coming from big tech, it’s clear that nuclear is gaining recognition as the clean, firm energy solution to today’s skyrocketing power needs. That gain in interest naturally comes with an increase in workforce demand.

President Trump, who has embraced nuclear alongside big tech, announced plans in executive order 14300, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” to increase American nuclear capacity from 100 GW to 400 GW by 2050. Reaching that goal will require the deployment of new technologies and the reformation of the reactor approval system. This move has increased the need for workers even more, with some projections rising as high as 300,000 people needed within the next decade.

While much attention is paid to K-12 outreach, new university curricula, and other educational tools that seek to set the next generation on a path into the industry, it’s important to remember that early education is only half of the story of workforce development. The immediacy and size of the demand is a reminder that much of the new nuclear workforce will come in the form people transitioning to nuclear from other industries.

Matt Wargon, principal engineer of nuclear design and shielding at TerraPower and the Young Member Director on the ANS Board of Directors, explained that ANS’s goal is to “pull as many folks as we can into the industry and lower the barrier of entry.”

One of the greatest challenges in bringing newcomers into the industry, he said, is clearing away the misperception that nuclear is too complicated a field to work in.

“Nuclear’s different—there are specific parts of our industry that are fundamentally different from other industries. Radiation shielding, health physics, NQA-1, these are things that are pretty foreign to people outside of the industry. . . . A lot of people see nuclear and think, ‘Oh I don’t understand that; I couldn’t be in this industry.’ That’s not true.”

Course contents

Developing a curriculum that surveys the entirety of the field of nuclear science and engineering is no small task. Walid Metwally, one of the designers and educators of the course who also serves as the lead for the Nuclear Criticality Safety Group in the Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, laid out the scale of the objective: “What we basically did is take a four-year bachelor program, condense it into one week, and try to bring it up to such a high level that it would be useful for [students].”

To that end, the course covers the following topics in-depth, over 40 hours, 33 of which are dedicated to lecturing and hands-on learning, with 7 hours of readings and assignments:

History and legacy of nuclear

Nuclear fundamentals

Introduction to the nuclear fuel cycle

Nuclear reactors and power generation

Licensing and regulatory concepts

Radiation detection and measurement

Health physics and radiation safety

Nonpower applications of nuclear energy

Nuclear safety culture

An elective module

Perspectives in nuclear.

The second module, “Nuclear fundamentals,” is by far the most intensive of the course. It gives a detailed overview of the critical basics that students need to firmly grasp in order to build a foundation for deeper learning. The learning objectives of the course are as follows:

Describe atomic and nuclear composition.

Define atomic number, mass number, and mole.

Calculate elemental weights.

Locate isotopes on the chart of nuclides.

Determine the number of stable and unstable isotopes of an element.

Compare and contrast the periodic table and the chart of nuclides.

The course also includes an elective module. Dur­ing the registration process, each student gets the opportunity to vote for one of five additional topics they would like to learn about: nuclear nonproliferation; decommissioning; advanced reactor technologies; simulation tools in the nuclear industry; or the storage, transportation, and disposal of radioactive material.

So far, each class has chosen to learn more about advanced reactor technologies, reflecting the broader excitement around the current investment and development in the field.

During the course at the Annual Meeting, students also heard from three guest speakers between modules: Kathryn Huff, Mark Peters, and Temitope Taiwo. Each speaker shared an abbreviated history of their careers, some of the projects they’ve worked on, and the unique vantage points they have on the industry, giving students the opportunity to hear the perspective of some of the industry’s leaders.

During her talk, Huff talked about becoming an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign; her transition into the Department of Energy, where she served as the assistant secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy; her return to UIUC three years later; and how ANS supported her along the way.

Peters, the newly elected vice president/president-elect of ANS, walked through the many pivots he has made throughout his career. After pursuing a geochemistry postdoc at Caltech, Peters worked in various roles at Los Alamos and Argonne National Laboratories, where his passion for nuclear was fostered. He eventually went on to work with Battelle before becoming the president and CEO of the Mitre Corporation.

Taiwo talked about his journey from the University of Ife in Nigeria to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then to the nuclear industry, where he first worked as a nuclear engineer at a Northeast Utilities. From there, he transitioned to a long career at Argonne, where he started as a nuclear engineer and eventually worked his way up to become the director of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Division.

The instructors

Walid Metwally walks students through the basics of photoelectric absorption.

Sunil Chirayath leading a session.

NUC 101 is currently delivered by five instructors. Along with Metwally and Arndt, Sunil Chirayath, Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar, and Mark Schanfein taught various modules throughout the week of the ANS Annual Conference, each contributing their own area of expertise and unique perspective on the industry.

Before his current role at ORNL, Metwally worked with the Atomic Energy Authority in Egypt and the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where he founded and chaired the nuclear engineering and mechanical engineering programs. His expertise is concentrated in the fields of criticality analysis of nuclear fuel storage, radiation transport modeling, and radiation detection and measurement.

Arndt currently serves as a distinguished scientist at ORNL, where his research involves advanced reactor design readiness. He spent 31 years with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and had extensive involvement in the U.S. response to the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. He has significant experience in nuclear power plant simulation, severe accident analysis, and nuclear power plant instrumentation and control.

Chirayath is a distinguished R&D scientist at ORNL. He also has had experience in India as a nuclear safety regulator. He has taught courses on nuclear fuel cycles and nuclear safeguards, Monte Carlo radiation transport, nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, physical protection system design, and human reliability programs. He is a nuclear security and nonproliferation specialist.

ANS past president Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar (2020–2021) is a professor of nuclear engineering and the associate dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Idaho State University. Also at ISU, she is a licensed senior reactor operator for their AGN-201 reactor. Her research has led to collaborations with PBMR in South Africa and EDF in France. She has also consulted with the European Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Schanfein has over 40 years of experience in nonproliferation and safeguards. He served as a technical expert on the ground in Russia after the collapse of the USSR and in North Korea during the disablement activities resulting from the 6-Party Talks. He has previously worked for Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Pacific Northwest, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, along with several roles within the IAEA. He currently serves as the senior nonproliferation advisor at Idaho National Laboratory.

The first students

“We expected a certain audience and we were absolutely surprised by the diversity of the people we got . . . . It was extremely broad,” Metwally said, explaining that there was “a range of people from analysts to communications people to managerial people who just wanted to learn more about the business.”

Participants with a wide range of job titles attended the Annual Conference’s two sections of the NUC 101 course.

To cater to the disparate backgrounds represented in the student body of the course, a healthy student-to-instructor ratio is maintained in NUC 101. Each section is limited to 20 students. Due to the unprecedented number of applications the course received this year, a second section was opened to allow 40 total students in. Despite that effort, 20 students still had to be waitlisted for the next course offering.

Michael Harkin, an R&D portfolio manager at Framatome, was one of the first 20 students to go through the inaugural class of NUC 101 last year. At the Wednesday executive session at this year’s Annual Conference, titled “How ANS is Supporting the Nuclear Workforce Today and Tomorrow,” Harkin detailed his experience in the class.

“It’s easy to grasp the fundamentals, but the devil’s in the details,” he said, reflecting on the challenge of the curriculum. “Nuclear power is complicated—it’s hard.” But going through the challenge of the course has been a massive boon to his career. “This is where it really helped me: understanding the whole picture . . . the fuel cycle, the licensing, why it’s so complicated, and all the safety regulations.”

When he went back to Framatome to talk with nuclear engineers he works alongside about his experience in the class, Harkin asked them what they wanted nontechnical workers in the industry to know. According to him, their answers were “right out of the NUC 101 table of contents.”

Harkin also explained that the course has allowed him to become a better advocate for nuclear, providing him with better understanding and making it easier for him to explain critical concepts to other nontechnical people inside and outside the industry. For him, this was a key part of the course’s value proposition—the way it spreads beyond the handful of students in the classroom. “There’s real power in spreading, at a fundamental level, this information.”

The future

Today, there are many changes on the horizon for NUC 101 and the broader project of ANS certifications and certificates. Most immediately, over the next few months, the course designers will be reviewing extensive feedback from each student who completed the course. Through this review, the designers will continue to modify and refine the content and presentation of the course.

The next live course for NUC 101 will be held at the 2025 Winter Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C., but there are also near-term plans to bring the course online as soon as early 2026. The most up-to-date details can be found at ans.org/nuclear101.

While the course designers were surprised at the wide range of job titles seen among the participants so far, they also have ambitions to reach an even wider audience. Tradespeople were marked as the biggest void in the current enrollment, and outreach work in the sector is a top priority considering the foundational role skilled welders, plumbers, electricians, and more will play in building and maintaining new nuclear infrastructure.

On the front of long-term planning, ANS is currently exploring the deployment of certification and certificate programs on the international stage. Metwally envisions an ANS presence in key countries with developing nuclear sectors that are geographically and politically positioned to serve as hubs for regional training. Countries like the UAE, the Philippines, and Poland were highlighted as potential hub locations.

When Metwally was asked why he thought that student applications more than tripled the expected numbers this year, he spoke to the unique value that NUC 101 adds to the nuclear ecosystem. “When you get such a demand for a course and it has sold out twice in a row and people are on waitlists, it’s indicating that we’re addressing something that’s needed. So why is it so popular? Because we’re addressing a gap in the market, something that people need that we were the right people to provide.”

“If you think about it, what is ANS?” Metwally pondered. “It’s a group of very dedicated nuclear people who just love their industry and want to get the opportunity to pay back. That’s what we did with this group of experts in developing this content, and people just caught on and said, ‘Yeah, we need it.’ So continuing this effort, whether in person or online, I think will be a continuing success story.”

The most up-to-date details can be found at ans.org/nuclear101.

Lucas Geiger is an editorial specialist for NN.