About 40% of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s staff members are expected to be eligible to retire by 2022.
That translates to 1,147 out of 2,868 permanent Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) employees on the rolls as of March 31. Eligibility for retirement is based on age and years of federal service. This number does not include Office of the Inspector General staffers.
The agency, which regulates civilian power plants and the waste they generate, says it is braced for the future.
“There are no indications that an abrupt increase in retirements would occur that would jeopardize our ability to perform our mission work,” said agency spokesman Scott Burnell. “Our workforce planning activities have taken into consideration reductions in workload and budget, and we monitor retirements and retirement eligibility very closely to ensure we will have the workforce we need to meet our mission.”
Agency personnel tend to stay on a few years beyond their eligibility for retirement, Burnell said.
An NRC graph of a sample of some 420 full-time-equivalent staff members showed 25 to 30 people in their 70s and fewer than 60 people in their 20s. Nearly half of those sampled were 59 or older.
In 2018, the NRC began annual updates of its workforce needs, attempting to project requirements for the next five years. Over that period, the agency anticipates it will need new employees for work on cybersecurity, probabilistic risk assessment, radiation protection, acquisitions and advanced reactors.
Cybersecurity will be a challenge because the entire federal government is hunting for specialists in that field, Burnell said by email. The NRC has to protect the agency’s internal information technology, plus provide instructions to reactor companies about their own cybersecurity.
Probabilistic risk assessment is the field of identifying and evaluating risks within complex technological fields. Radiation protection covers NRC oversight workers during the decommissioning of reactors. Acquisitions cover the NRC staffers supervising purchases for the agency.
Burnell said the submission of new reactor designs for NRC approval will require extra people on the agency’s staff for licensing, research, rule-making, and oversight. Skills relevant to these jobs include: high temperature materials science; neutronics, or the movement of fission-sustaining neutrons; severe accident response practices; thermal hydraulics; and digital instrumentation and controls.
“Although the need is not immediate, the agency is proactively conducting activities to prepare for effective and efficient reviews of advanced reactor technologies,” Burnell wrote.
Burnell added that the agency has targeted potential future “entry level” hires, which includes both new college graduates and “junior” level staff who have fewer than two years of experience.
“The good news is that, while the NRC has not been hiring entry level employees for the last couple years, we continued to feed our pipeline with summer internships and maintained our presence on campuses across the country by providing technical seminars, visiting with students, and engaging with faculty,” Burnell said. “This should position us well to recruit college graduates in the near future.”
