You know, that's not a bad idea. Take a few weeks off from a house job to work outages.
Unfortunately, they already do this. It's called shared-resources. It is also a lot more expensive than hiring contractors. Look at the math.
Let's say a "fleet" has 10 plants.
Each plant has 22 house techs.
When one plant has an outage, each of the others sends 2 techs.
So, the plant in outage has 40 house techs, while all the others have 20.
But, in the summer, you have 22 house techs at each of 10 plants, which only need 20 to operate. That is a total of 20 house techs more than you need. Sure, during outage season, everybody is staffed right up, but outage season, even with 10 plants, is less than half of the year. Even if they coordinated their schedule so that only one plant was in outage at a time, they could pull it off in under 20 weeks considering that not every plant has an outage every year.
What do you do with the extra 20 techs for the other 32 weeks? You can train them. You can rotate them all through vacations. You can do lots of things. But the bottom line is that they will all be sitting on payroll as extra bodies. 32 weeks x 40 hrs x 20 techs x $40/hr (incl. benefits) = $1,024,000.00, which doesn't include their travel expenses, office space, PPE, and all the other expense of carrying 20 unnecessary employees for nearly half the year.
The other option is to put only 20 techs at each plant, and leave them short-handed whenever another plant is in outage. That comes out to more money, because they will basically be 2 people short for at least 15 weeks each year. The overtime they will have to pay for that would be 15 weeks x 40 hours/week x $60/hr x 2techs per plant x 9 plants = $648,000.00.
If neither case is 100% true, then figure the average is $836,000 per year in payroll costs alone. Add another $300,000.00 in travel and living costs. So, you are up to a $1,136,000 just to have all your outages staffed by a mere 40 techs. That's 20 per shift TOTAL. And I still haven't added in the money they get paid when they are actually working those outages.
That amounts to $9480 to $13240 per tech per outage ON TOP of the wages that you would have to pay them for the outage itself. Considering that they are mostly union members, at $40/hr their weekly package is worth about $5,000.00 each.
Final cost per week, per tech, to have an outage = $8160 to $9413
OR
I can get Bartlett to pay each Sr. RP tech $30.00/hr and $125 per diem. Even at 100% markup that comes out to $6155 per week. I save two grand per tech x 20 techs x 20 weeks = $400,000.00 in cost savings. My boss will love me, I'll get a little bonus that I'll use for that second honeymoon and have a little left for hair plugs .... (I'm just dreaming now.)
But you can work all 20 of those weeks and maybe catch an outage at the end with some other "fleet". You'll get 20+ weeks of work, lots of OT. Make about $50k plus another 12 - 15k in unemployment. Not too shabby for only working half a year and getting all your summers off.
With DOE slurping up all the current road techs, one or the other of the above will have to happen for nuclear power plants to have the RP support they need for outage season.