Is a nuclear engineer with no experience somehow equivalent to, say, a mechanical engineer with nuclear experience?
It really depends on what company and what kinds of positions you are looking at. At a power plant, the answer may be "yes". For example, the power plant I work at has an engineering department of approximately 100 people, and you can count on one hand the number of engineers whose job directly deals with the core (flux maps, calorimetric, shutdown margin, etc). Granted, we have a whole department at corporate that deals with core design, safety analysis, fuel performance and the like, but I'm just talking about engineers here at the plant.
That's not to say we don't want to hire nukes, but when you look at what we're here to do (make electricity), nuclear engineers really only have a small role at the plant. There's only one core per unit, but tons of valves, pipes, pumps, sensors, breakers, controlers, etc. Look at Crystal River and SONGS, two plants that have been shutdown for extended periods of time for reasons unrelated to their fuel integrity or performance.
You'll find more demand for a nuke degree in organizations or companies one or more degrees away from the power plant. Not at the station, but at the utilities core design or safety analysis group. Or not at a utility but at a vendor like Areva, Bechtel, Westinghouse, B&W, etc. But keep in mind even when you go to places like B&W that are designing reactors, there will still be a fair amount of demand for those mechanical engineering types with nuclear experience because they'll tend to be more apt at designing other systems.
