{"id":37487,"date":"2017-01-05T16:45:57","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T20:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/?p=202"},"modified":"2024-02-15T20:30:04","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T20:30:04","slug":"a-battle-for-nuclear-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/our-take\/a-battle-for-nuclear-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"A Battle For Nuclear Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<aside class=\"float-right\" style=\"text-align: center; padding-left: 10px;\">\n<h3><span class=\"md-bold\" style=\"color: #9d1c20;\">Top-Skilled Military Veterans Deserve Rewarding Jobs<\/span><\/h3><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"clearpath-lightbox-img alignnone wp-image-4476 size-full lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/67\/2018\/01\/801e2ab822b3478e356241ba21a33ddb-navy-to-nuclear-01.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"487\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 500px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 500\/487;\">\n<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p>The nuclear industry is one of our most sophisticated and important industries, a lifeblood for our <a href=\"\/jays-take\/nuclear-the-ecosystem\">economy and national security<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But we aren\u2019t harnessing enough of the nuclear talent we pay top dollar for in the Navy because they have nowhere to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Providing a pipeline for our top-skilled military veterans to get the high-paying and rewarding jobs they deserve is one of the more under-acknowledged benefits of preserving and advancing the commercial nuclear fleet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Giles was a Navy \u201cnuke.\u201d After graduating from its nuclear program (an impressive feat with a 75 percent failure rate), he spent four years traveling the world on a reactor-powered submarine. And after leaving the service in 1997, he went to work for \u2026 an asphalt plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A nuclear sector job was at the top of his wish list \u201cbut it was not in the cards at the time,\u201d Giles said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During his 10 years managing the asphalt plant, David received a steady stream of inquiries for his services in the advanced nuclear sector \u2013 in the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI used to get them all the time [but] I prefer to stay stateside,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But David may have been more of an exception to the rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The UAE government spent about $100 million to establish a nuclear development industry and they hired a bunch of our best people to run it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<aside class=\"float-left\" style=\"text-align: center; padding-right: 10px;\">\n<h3><span class=\"md-bold\" style=\"color: #9d1c20;\">Nuclear Jobs Are Headed Overseas<\/span><\/h3><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"clearpath-lightbox-img alignnone wp-image-4476 size-full lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/67\/2018\/01\/a12422d0411e06f177be2b22a5d6f838-nuclear-jobs-overseas-01.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"487\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 500px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 500\/487;\">\n<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p>And with 38 percent of the nuclear workforce eligible to retire in the next few years, making sure those like David join the U.S. commercial sector may be that much more critical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One senior manager at a leading nuclear utility referred to some of the speciality-skilled nuclear labor as endangered species. \u201cThe ultimate challenge that comes with this is knowledge transfer,\u201d the manager said. \u201cWe struggle with this in a mighty way, and when you combine that with the desire of young employees to move around and up, it can be difficult to find folks to anchor those critical roles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Giles is now a construction compliance engineer at Southern Company\u2019s Vogtle advanced reactor project, which comes with \u201csignificantly better\u201d pay. It\u2019s also a project where \u201cthe caliber of the workforce is extremely high,\u201d he said, including former Navy submarine mates and other vets from the Army, Coast Guard and Marines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the good news is projects like Vogtle allow the the industry to attract bright young talent into the fold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Steven Zabo was deployed with fellow Marines in the first unit of the surge in the Iraq War in 2007. It was \u2026 stressful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it also helps in handling the pressure and multitasking necessary in his current job as a maintenance engineer at Vogtle. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to be the tip of the nuclear spear essentially and we\u2019re trying to do it right safe and compliant,\u201d he said. \u201cSo there\u2019s stress. The whole nuclear industry depends upon it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Don Gillahan, another graduate of the Navy nuclear program, said \u201cthere wasn\u2019t a lot of prospects in the nuclear industry\u201d when he left the service in 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gillahan instead went to work for Asian auto manufacturers that were flooding the Southeast in the 1990s and offering the high-caliber jobs the nuclear industry wasn\u2019t at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The cutting-edge auto manufacturing being done by these companies in the 1990s is a \u201cvery good parallel\u201d to what Southern is doing at Vogtle, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But unlike in the Navy, the commercial nuclear sector just wasn\u2019t building or expanding for many years (there were no reactors under construction at existing plants from 1977 to 2013).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason the Navy builds subs all the time is so \u201cthey don\u2019t forget how and lose the people that do that job,\u201d Gillahan says. If you don\u2019t build new commercial nuclear reactors \u201ceverybody who used to do it is now fishing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<aside class=\"float-right\" style=\"text-align: center; padding-left: 10px;\">\n<h3><span class=\"md-bold\" style=\"color: #9d1c20;\">38% of the Nuclear Workforce Is Eligible<br>to Retire in the Next Few Years<\/span><\/h3><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"clearpath-lightbox-img alignnone wp-image-4476 size-full lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/67\/2018\/01\/caa71b221a859c560dcdc154242e4e15-nuclear-workforce-01.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"487\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 500px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 500\/487;\">\n<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p>The biggest issue is the retirement of the road warriors, specialists who travel the country to refuel nuclear plants during outages. As we begin losing more plants, we lose these guys. And as we lose them and others to retirement, it\u2019s going to make nuclear more expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are promising developments, thanks to programs aimed at more broadly countering the 1.5 million energy sector retirements expected in the next 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Helmets to Hardhats, a nonprofit program created in 2002, connects retired and transitioning active-duty military service members with particularly skilled training to career opportunities in the nuclear and other construction industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Troops to Energy Jobs was created in 2010 by the Center for Energy Workforce Development and is specifically designed to get them the high-quality jobs in the energy sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Veterans in Energy, a joint federal, industry and labor effort, followed in the past year and aims to offer transition, retention and professional development support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But we need to do more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We can\u2019t afford to let more jobs slip away and for the industry to literally retire itself out of existence. A whole <a href=\"\/jays-take\/nuclear-the-ecosystem\">nuclear ecosystem<\/a> depends on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><p style=\"font-size:20px\"><strong>View more of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/our-take\/\">Our Take<\/a>&nbsp;and let us&nbsp;know what you think at <a href=\"mailto:jaylistens@saperemarketing.com\">jaylistens@saperemarketing.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the more important advantages to expanding our existing and advanced nuclear fleet may surprise some: providing a pipeline for our top-skilled Navy and other military veterans to get the high-paying and rewarding jobs they deserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":296,"featured_media":42513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"wds_primary_category":19,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-37487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-take","tag-nuclear"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/296"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saperemarketing.com\/clearpath\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}