Texas nuclear power plants seek new workforce

Houston Chronicle ^ | January 14, 2014 | Jim Malewitz, Texas Tribune

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"....Not everyone is equipped to operate and maintain a reactor, or to monitor radiation levels inside a plant and on its own employees. Nuclear energy officials feared they would soon lack the manpower to operate the country's current reactors as their licenses were renewed, let alone the new ones.

"It's at all levels, from the managers on down,"Koehl said of his company's needs, adding that specialty engineers and people with other industry-tailored skills are particularly hard to find.

That includes Jesse Wells, who has coordinated 18 of STP's planned outages, the monthlong powering down of a reactor to refuel it and perform thousands of maintenance operations—a process that happens once every year and a half.

Wells, who came to STP after spending years working with the Navy's nuclear program and has stayed for three decades, is set to leave in May in what he calls the plant's first wave of retirements.

Wells, 57, said he was anxious about the move but only on a personal level. He had no doubts, he said, that someone capable would fill his job. Still, he put off postponing his initial retirement plans to work one last outage alongside his successor.

Company officials have unleashed an aggressive plan to transfer knowledge within the company, and to educate students to fill voids left by retirement.

The company, Matagorda County's biggest employer, is mostly looking in its backyard. In the last six years, it has spent millions of dollars designing the curriculum at local high schools and community colleges and awarding scholarships to students in the area.

Graduates of the two-year nuclear power technology degree program at Wharton County Junior College, for instance, can expect to earn starting salaries of $65,000 to $70,000 if plant officials, who closely monitor enrollment, offer them jobs.

"We're trying to homegrow as much as we can," Koehl said........."

[redgolum]

Interesting. This is local to me (Muscatine is a few miles away).

Lets just say that isn’t what some of the contractors working for MidAm told me.

[xp38]

This guy has experience

[Ditto]

According to this article, MidAmerican did not even approach the NRC about building a plant. They worked with the state PUC in exploring the possibility of a new nuke, looked at potential sites, but they never even selected a design nor asked for permits. It looks like the NRC had zero to do with it.

[listenhillary]

You left out the environmentalists and their lawyers.

[citizen]

Separately, MidAmerican said its recently announced plan to build additional wind generation would help keep customers' costs down. If approved by state regulators, the wind expansion will reduce customer rates by $10 million a year by 2017, starting with a $3.3 million decrease in 2015.

Do the winds on the plains blow in a particularly favorable manner for wind generation?

T. Boone Pickins was hot to go on a $4+ billion wind farm in West Texas. I guess the fracking/natural gas developments changed the economic equation for him. Or maybe he was angling for taxpayer subsidies, I can't quite remember.

[PAR35]

Texas doesn’t even have enough electricity for winter, much less this coming summer. We need about a dozen new nuke plants.