Chief:
Emergency Planning is like an animal of its own at a commercial power station. Unlike Maintenance or Operations, you won't be involved in the daily routine of the plant. The good thing about it is you'll be able to take ownership of your own area without too much dependence on other departments. Depending on how your role is defined, you may be involved in the creation and execution of emergency drill scenarios, interface with offsite agencies (state, county governments, NRC), the administration and maintenance of emergency communication equipment / procedures, or emergency plan training – or a combination of all this. Having said that, emergency planning is a high profile job in some stations because of the close proximity to metropolitan areas. At other stations, it’s not as important.
You’ll probably get a small desk / cubicle setup. You’ll be required to be on-call and to participate in drills and to respond to actual emergencies in some capacity (rare).
To be good at the job, a decent working knowledge of the plant is important. You’ll have to know what’s going on when they say that the suction line to the SI Pumps has sheared at the RWST, or that a loss of offsite power has occurred and the EDG output breakers have failed to close. You'll have to get familiar with Emergency Action Levels and the level of response to each category. You won't be responsible for initiating and mobilizing the E-Plan, but you'll have to have a working knowledge of it, which by definition includes a working knowledge of the plant. It will be next to impossible to get that knowledge “on the fly”. Your department manager will have been formerly licensed. Some others in your department may also have been licensed or may have spent many years in certain disciplines (such as Rad Protection / Health Physics). To get an SRO cert (as Roll Tide mentioned) is not an easy thing – it takes several months. An SRO license takes longer (and is more difficult; ie. need that NRC license) and definitely involves some follow-on commitment to Operations. Additionally, most utilities won’t just send you through a license class with the initial intent of getting an SRO cert (and without some additional other commitment either to Training or Operations).
I’m not trying to discourage you whatsoever. With your resume, you have plenty of choices and you can definitely write your own ticket. You may want to take this job as a stepping stone to something else. With that retirement from the military, maybe you wouldn’t mind the desk in the cubicle for a few years without too much responsibility. Since you asked about the promotion potential in your original post, I’ll tell you that it’s bleak unless you intend – at some point – to edge over to Operations for a license or to some other discipline that may interest you (Maintenance, I&C, Training, etc.). So, whatever your intentions are, I'd say you can't really lose by taking the job. After all, it's not the military and you can quit any time you like!
Salary depends on a lot of factors and I can’t guess reliably without knowing where the station is. It will be comparable to other first line supervisors at the station.
