This is a growing problem that the Plants or Contract companies don't care about fixing. I work an outage a few years ago at a Florida Plant where the average age of the Hp Tech was in the late 50's we had two in there 70's. I recently work an outage at a southern plant where a District Manager or whatever he's called came and gave his were going to do this, that and the other thing speech. When this staffing shortage subject came up. I ask him if he thought someone in there right mind was going to drive half way across the country for no per diem, no travel and barely above minimum wage to get into this business, his reply "well that's just what they will have to do if they want to get into this business". Great attitude.
Now all the Nuke sites are making noise that there going to build all these new plants. Right! Who's going to run them ? If they started digging today, you wouldn't see a working on line plant for 10 years. How long does it take to train an SRO, or Plant Operator ? All the new plants that are on the drawing board are nothing like the ones running today. All your nuke sites are cutting jobs, doing buy outs for early retirements. ANO at one time had almost 2000 people running the plant on a daily basis. Now I'd bet there's not 900 out there. 20 and 25 day outages are the norm for most plants. When i first got into this business you could bank on 8 to 10 weeks easy. A lot of people have left this business or gone house or DOE because two 4 week outages are not enough to live on, besides the fact of no insurance and no retirement other than death. R