Faculty and staff from Winthrop University recently toured the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site as part of a workforce development partnership.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced the signing of a project labor agreement (PLA) between Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) contractor UCOR and North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU). The agreement, which allows for flexibility in wage increases and other incentives, is expected to help recruit and retain skilled construction trade workers at the DOE site in Tennessee.
Contractors at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site teamed up recently to highlight career opportunities available at the site during the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce WKY (West Kentucky) Launch Experience.
International engineering, construction, and project-management company Bechtel, which is headquartered in Reston, Va., opened its newest office, the Engineering Execution Center, in Knoxville, Tenn. The office—the second Bechtel has opened stateside in the last few months—will provide engineering support for the company’s numerous mission-based projects, and it is the second new U.S. office opened by Bechtel in the past few months—the other being in Chandler, Arizona.
Matt Rasmussen
Do you remember the days when nuclear was a contractor’s dream? When craftworkers could work outages every fall and spring at a high wage and make enough to take summers off? When companies had to turn down craftworkers looking for outage work because there were more people than positions? Well, those days are far behind us. How many of us struggle every year to fill our outage billets for pipefitters, boilermakers, and electricians? How many of us see return rates of less than 50 percent for some sites?
Industrial growth and demand in the United States have skyrocketed over the past 10 years in no small part due to our ability to provide reliable and low-cost power. The Tennessee Valley region’s population is growing at three times the national average. Nashville is growing at the rate of one Chattanooga—that is, 180,000 people—every four years.
The Department of Energy today announced a noncompetitive financial assistance cooperative agreement with Southeast New Mexico College, located in Carlsbad, N.M., for educational programs to enhance the knowledge, skills, and abilities of current Waste Isolation Pilot Plant employees while also building and training WIPP’s next-generation workforce.
“It is critical after the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station restart that we reduce our cost and increase our capacity factor while becoming more economically competitive.” Ichiro Ihara, chief nuclear officer of Chubu Electric Power, made this observation recently when the Electric Power Research Institute visited the Japanese nuclear power plant for a strategy development session for plant modernization. EPRI’s team of five specialists spent four days at Hamaoka to investigate the feasibility of potential improvements—the third step of the EPRI modernization strategy planning process. It was a trip six months in the making—and the first time EPRI has applied its nuclear plant modernization process outside the United States.
In January 2003—early in the “nuclear renaissance” of the 2000s—around 70 nuclear utility executives attended an ANS Utility Executive Conference, which was organized around the theme “Future Vision.” They traveled to Scottsdale, Ariz., to discuss how the nuclear community could achieve the bright future they envisioned just ahead—does that sound familiar?
Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org
Wow, that was a banger! The 2023 Annual Meeting had the energy level of an ANS Student Conference. That’s no easy feat. I’ve had several requests for my opening plenary remarks. Here is a shortened version, edited for reading:
So, “Failure Is Not an Option.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure about it in the beginning. It’s not anodyne like “Powering Our Future!” or some punny Indy reference like “Racing to the Finish.” It didn’t seem to fit our situation.
That phrase, popularized by the movie Apollo 13, has its origins in a time of crisis: three men trying to “eyeball” a free return trajectory to Earth while a team of NASA engineers figures out how to literally put a square peg into a round hole to save the astronauts’ lives.
The American Nuclear Society is collaborating with the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership (KFP) at North Carolina State University to introduce a nuclear science curriculum to Kenan Fellows and the K-12 students they teach.
The American Nuclear Society Diversity and Inclusion in ANS Committee (DIA) is offering a webinar open to both members and nonmembers on the subject of “The Impact of National, State, and Local Policies on the Nuclear Workforce.” This roundtable discussion, to be held June 29, will explore the impact that national and state policies have on recruiting and retaining a strong nuclear workforce. Although national policy and the advancement of nuclear technology have always gone hand-in-hand regarding regulatory concerns for novel reactor designs or waste form and repository policy, the evolution of state and local policies is affecting the workforce in different ways with a younger and growing workforce.
Registration is required for the webinar. Click here for details or to sign up.
Deploying new reactors on the scale required to meet U.S. and international zero-carbon goals by 2050 will require rapid growth in the nuclear workforce, as American Nuclear Society executive director/chief executive officer Craig Piercy emphasized during his opening plenary address at the ANS Annual Meeting on June 12. Piercy pointed to the Department of Energy’s Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear, which estimates that an additional 375,000 people will be required to construct and operate 200 GW of advanced nuclear reactors by 2050—a dramatic increase from about 100,000 today. Where will those engineers, constructors, and operators be found? The 38 nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development agreed last week to a new recommendation from the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) that points to one way to increase the nuclear workforce: increase the number of women participating in the workforce.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) will offer an estimated $24.5 million to minority-serving institutions to help foster a sustainable and diverse science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce pipeline within the office.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the managing and operating contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., was recognized by the American Heart Association for its commitments to employee health and well-being. The company received a gold level, as measured by the association’s 2022 Workforce Well-being Scorecard.
The United Kingdom’s nuclear industry is expanding, with the U.K. government committed to supporting the build of more civil nuclear power plants (deployments up to 24 GW by 2050)1 while also undertaking large-scale decommissioning work in parallel.2 The defense sector is experiencing growth with the decommissioning, operation, and new build of submarines, plus managing the U.K.’s deterrent.3 Although the civil and defense programs are separate, they draw on the same group of skills and people.
Steven Arndt
president@ans.org
One of the duties of the ANS president is to visit with American Nuclear Society student sections. As some of you know, I have been doing this both in person and virtually. Although meeting via Zoom and other platforms is easier in terms of scheduling and travel, there is nothing like being able to interact face to face. Visiting student sections in person has been the highlight of my time as president. As I have stated on several occasions, the enthusiasm and excitement I have seen among the nuclear engineering students in the U.S. is nothing short of exhilarating!
When we think of workforce planning, those of us who have had long associations with universities naturally think first of undergraduate and graduate nuclear engineering programs at our universities, but this is of course only a part of the overall solution. The first—and in many ways the most important—part of workforce development is getting our nation’s youth excited about nuclear science and technology.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP) has issued a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) titled "Community and Junior College Trade Occupation Program." The FOA encourages grant applications from tribal and minority serving community and junior colleges that diversify student and faculty populations, enhance training programs in trade and skilled labors, and increase the capacity of the NNSA's nuclear security enterprise workforce.
Eligible tribal and minority serving community and junior colleges have until February 17, 2023, 11:50 p.m. EST to respond to the FOA with proposals.
United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), the lead environmental cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM), has been named one of the Knoxville News Sentinel’s “Top Workplaces” in eastern Tennessee for 2022. The award is the result of a confidential, third-party survey of UCOR’s 2,000-member workforce by the Knoxville News Sentinel and the survey company Energage.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 21 struck down a Washington state workers’ compensation law that was designed to make it easier for workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site to receive compensation benefits. The court, by unanimous decision, found that the law violates the U.S. Supremacy Clause and discriminates against the federal government and its contractors.
Located near Richland, Wash., the Hanford Site produced plutonium for the U.S. weapons program for more than 40 years and is currently undergoing a massive radiological cleanup mission involving around 10,000 workers.
Universities are places where professionals, experts, and students come together to teach and learn, to conduct and disseminate research, and to dream and explore. Universities have a long history of technological innovation and development. It should therefore come as no surprise that institutes of higher education have been an integral part of the recent explosion of innovation within the advanced nuclear reactor community. Universities have not only powered workforce and technology development, but in a number of cases, they have served as the actual birthplaces of today’s advanced reactor designs.