Nuclear Power: Actions Needed to Improve NRC’s Assessment of Its Workforce Needs

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Douglas W. Jones · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A GAO report finds the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lost about 500 staff on net between July 2024 and June 2026, mostly to voluntary retirements, even as officials expect a surge in advanced reactor licensing applications tied to policymakers' push for more nuclear energy capacity. The 2024 ADVANCE Act gave NRC three new hiring tools — direct hire, pay flexibility, and bonuses — but the agency has used only the bonus authority so far, awarding $335,000 to 18 staff.

NRC officials cited a recent reorganization and an unfinished workforce-planning tool as reasons for not using the other authorities, and that tool's completion date has already slipped multiple times, now targeted for early fiscal 2027. GAO recommends NRC finalize the tool on schedule and set metrics to judge whether its new hiring powers are actually solving the shortage.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Congress handed the nuclear regulator new tools two years ago and the agency has used exactly one of them, and only partway, while the retirements keep piling up like unopened mail. Waiting on a workforce-planning tool that keeps missing its own deadlines is a strange way to prepare for a supposed boom in reactor applications. If the tool slips again past early 2027, don't be surprised. That seems to be the pattern here.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Heavy Heart · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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