What about other crafts such as decon,maintainance, refuelers ect???
Gee where do I start? Okay, the easy one first. Decon is not a craft, nor are deconners skilled workers. Admittedly, some types of decon are highly specialized, and can only be done well by experienced people. Conversely, these jobs will be totally screwed up by anyone else. But there are very few of these jobs and enough people to do them. Most of deconner work is just plain unskilled labor.
The terms "maintenance and refuellers" are a little bit too comprehensive. Maintenance includes Electricians, Pipefitters, Painters, Millwrights, Carpenters, Operating Engineers, Laborers, Boilermakers, ... and a few other crafts that I haven't mentioned. There is no shortage of people in these trades, either union or non-union. Periodically however, they do get stretched thin when large projects take up most of the manpower. The majority of these people do not have to chase nuclear power plant outages to stay employed. They can make more money on a non-nuke job without having to park a mile from the jobsite, get their lunch x-rayed, or have to wear pajamas and coveralls all day. They can drink water, eat sandwiches, and take smoke breaks realtively close to their work if not right on the spot, AND the jobs are not offered at 85% of the local scale like nuke jobs frequently are. So, if the nuke outage seems a little sparsely populated, it isn't because there aren't enough people to do the work; it's because they would rather do it somewhere else. Nuke outages are no longer the guaranteed moneymakers that they once were, and most people aren't locked into them like some of us are.
Likewise refuellers are a conglomeration of trades. Reactor disassembly and reassembly can be done with a single dedicated crew or it can be done with an amalgam of various tradespersons. It isn't really all that different from the work they do outside the nukes - except for the funny yellow clothes and the pesky HP techs. Bolts and nuts are bolts and nuts. Picking up a reactor head is kind of like picking up any other big, heavy, expensive, delicate object. The small specialized crew of people who actually move the fuel are trained for this specific task, but there are puhhlllleennnnnnnttttyyyy of people to do it. Though union workers generally recognize this as Millwright work, non-union contractors can basically knock any breathing human off a barstool and train him to move fuel. Sound familiar? Just like deconning, moving fuel doesn't require a graduate degree, it just requires that you pass the training, stay sober at work and pass the urine screening.
In all the country, there is no looming shortage of people in any occupation. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for Unemployment Insurance, and Bush wouln't be getting so much grief about his Guest Worker program. The artificial shortage occurs when there will be 21 nuke outages during the same week this coming October, combined with the fact that there will be three to four times as many outages at non-nuke power plants at that time, and that it will still be outdoor construction season in most of the country. People can't be at more than one place at one time (or I'd be somewhere else right now as well as here
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Saying that there is a shortage of people to do nuke outages is a lot like trying to have a parade where all the bands march side-by-side and then complaining that the street isn't as wide as it should be.
