The Nuclear Comeback: Training the Engineers Who Will Power AI

For most of the last three decades, nuclear power in the United States has grown very little. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), most of the country’s operating nuclear capacity was built between 1967 and 1990, and the fleet has been shrinking ever since, from a peak well above 100 reactors down to the 94 that operate today. New construction all but disappeared, with just one reactor, Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2, coming online in the more than two decades before Georgia’s Vogtle Units 3 and 4 connected to the grid in 2023 and 2024.

That long pause is ending. Renewed concern over climate change, a national push to reshore manufacturing, and the staggering electricity appetite of AI data centers have reversed decades of flat demand and put nuclear energy back at the center of the conversation. The federal government is driving this growth, with a series of 2025 executive orders aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).

Building that much nuclear capacity will require a workforce far larger than the one the industry has now, and the people who will design, build, and run these plants are only beginning to enter the pipeline. “I don’t think the nuclear power industry has seen so much innovation and activity in a long time,” says Dr. Todd Allen, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. “Put all those things together, and it certainly looks like there’s a lot of new opportunity in nuclear.”

The DOE projects that nuclear energy jobs will triple by 2050, and universities and community colleges are now racing to prepare students for that hiring wave.

Keep reading to learn how schools are training the next generation of nuclear engineers, what small modular reactors mean for the field, and why the AI boom has made this one of the most promising energy careers to enter right now.

Meet the Expert: Todd Allen, PhD

Dr. Todd Allen is the associate dean for research in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Chihiro Kikuchi Collegiate Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, having previously chaired the university’s Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences department.

Dr. Allen began his career as an officer in the US Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, operating submarine propulsion reactors, before earning his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan in 1997. From 2013 to 2016, he served as deputy laboratory director for science and technology at Idaho National Laboratory, where he led the transformation of the Advanced Test Reactor into a national user facility. He is also a senior fellow at Third Way, a Washington, DC, think tank, where he supports its clean energy work, and the founding director of Michigan’s Fastest Path to Zero Initiative. He has authored more than 200 technical publications, is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and sits on the society’s board.

Why Nuclear, and Why Now

Nuclear power in the United States sat quiet for a long time, and only recently has that started to change. Private equity investment in advanced nuclear reached $783.3 million in 2024, more than the previous 15 years combined, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“After we built the first generation of commercial nuclear plants, for a long time we didn’t have a lot of new commercial activity. A lot of research and development went on, but starting about 10 years ago, a lot more interest from private funders, a lot more companies started up, a lot more innovation not only in technology but in business models,” Dr. Allen explains.

Employers are betting on the shift. In the DOE’s 2025 US Energy & Employment Report, nuclear construction employers projected a 9.2 percent workforce increase, and nuclear fuels employers anticipated a 5.7 percent jump, the highest of any fuel source surveyed.

Demand is the primary driver. Until recently, utilities had little reason to build new capacity. “We went through a long period where it was fairly flat, but now we started to see an interest in electrification of more things, bringing back manufacturing to the US, and data centers and sort of the new national infrastructure,” he notes. “All that has driven the need for more electricity, more power.” Of those forces, the energy needs of AI data centers are the ones reshaping the timeline, sending tech companies straight to nuclear developers in search of reliable power.

The Many Jobs Inside a Nuclear Career

A plant runs on far more than the people who studied reactors. Of the roughly 68,000 Americans working directly in nuclear power, only about 16,600 are nuclear engineers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2026). A single plant employs 500 to 800 workers drawn from universities, community colleges, the military, and the trades, per the Nuclear Energy Institute.

“You will need designers, you will need operators, you will need technicians who are keeping plants operating. You will need all the support staff, right? Accountants and security guards, right? So it’s very broad. Think of any industrial facility. There’s a lot of potential associated jobs,” says Dr. Allen. The credential matters less than the interest. “Don’t feel that to be part of a nuclear occupation, you necessarily have to have a nuclear degree. It’s actually only a fraction. You can be a mechanical engineer and go work with a nuclear plant. You can be an industrial engineer,” he advises.

The construction phase widens the door further. Building a large reactor employs up to 4,500 workers at peak, and for every 100 permanent plant jobs, another 250 are created across the surrounding economy, according to NEI.

How University Programs Are Responding

Dr. Allen has watched what students want from a nuclear education shift over his years in the classroom. “There’s a lot of interest in the other things that are necessary to deploy technology, including entrepreneurship, policy, and social implications of technology deployment. As educators, I think we have to be a little more sophisticated,” he explains.

However, there is an even bigger problem with growing the nuclear workforce: awareness. “We’ve been holding a residential high school summer school for high school kids, and a lot of them come in saying I didn’t really even know what nuclear was,” he shares.

The scale of the need, and the range of students it has to reach, is more than any one school can handle alone. Dr. Allen’s own program joined a proposal, since accepted, to build regional workforce consortia that link universities with community colleges and local utilities. The federal government is backing that kind of effort with a $100 million program to fund nuclear safety training and workforce development. “Instead of the University of Michigan only worrying about recruiting students who want to get a typical bachelor’s, or master’s, or PhD, we need to be talking to Monroe County Community College, because they’re looking for a different group of students who might want a two-year degree and go more directly into technical jobs,” he notes.

Understanding Small Modular and Advanced Reactors

Much of the excitement in nuclear right now centers on a new class of reactor. The International Atomic Energy Agency generally defines a small modular reactor (SMR) as a unit producing about 300 megawatts of electricity or less, roughly a third of a traditional plant’s output, built largely from factory-made modules. “We engineers, in the way we talk, we call them small modular reactors. Some of them are actually not that small, and some of them aren’t modular. More often we use the term advanced or next generation,” he explains.

The distinction is not just semantic. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission reserves the “SMR” label for light-water reactors under 300 MWe and classifies non-light-water designs, such as sodium-cooled reactors, as “advanced reactors” instead. What sets this generation apart is variety, where the first fleet was essentially one design repeated.

“We built one commercial generation of nuclear power plants. These were very, very large,” explains Dr. Allen. “One gigawatt of electrical output each. In this new generation of reactors, there are different technologies. The parallel might be to think of it like fuel for your car. Some cars might use gasoline, some might use diesel, some might use a battery. It’s still a car.”

Different coolants and fuels each solve one problem while introducing another. TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, got its construction permit approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March 2026, the agency’s first for a non-light-water design in more than 40 years, with ground broken the following month.

“Bill Gates’ reactor that they’re building out in Wyoming uses liquid sodium as a coolant. Why do they do that? It transfers heat well. You can’t have a Three Mile Island meltdown. Now, what’s the challenge? Sodium burns, so if you get a leak in the pipes, you don’t want it exposed to the outside atmosphere. You have to do something to make it a lower-oxygen environment. So it’s a trade-off,” he shares.

The “modular” half of the name carries its own logic, and it is as much financial as technical. A conventional plant earns nothing until the entire build is finished, a stretch that can run five years or more. “If instead of building one giant plant you build five modules, while you’re doing construction, as soon as you get the first module in, that’s one-fifth of the total power. You start selling it. So you’re making some money quicker,” Dr. Allen notes.

For all the momentum, the technology is still mostly on the drawing board. As Dr. Allen noted, few SMRs are operating anywhere yet. The first in North America is under construction at Ontario’s Darlington site in Canada, with its first unit expected around 2030, per World Nuclear News.

Tech Companies, Data Centers, and the Grid

The clearest sign of nuclear’s revival is who is buying the power. In September 2024, Constellation Energy announced it would restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, under a 20-year agreement to sell its entire output to Microsoft for its data centers, per Constellation. Similar restarts are underway at Palisades in Michigan and Clinton in Illinois.

“Microsoft doesn’t want to design or build a reactor, but they want to buy one of these advanced reactors because all of these tech companies use a tremendous amount of computation and it uses a lot of electricity. I’ve seen business deals where they wanted to make a purchase agreement with an existing nuclear power plant for 80 percent of the power,” Dr. Allen says.

One reason they push toward their own dedicated supply is a grid that cannot connect new projects fast enough. “For decades now, it’s very, very hard to build transmission lines in the US. I’ve read things like four to five years to get a new spot on the grid. So the tech companies are looking at this and saying, well, I can’t wait that long. I need to go after dedicated power,” he explains.

That workaround solves the tech companies’ problem but creates a public one. “If they’re not hooking up to the grid, they’re also not paying for the grid. We may be incentivizing the people who can afford it to get off the grid that the rest of us need, which is going to cause a different problem long term,” Dr. Allen notes.

Advice for Prospective Students

Nuclear engineers earned a median of $133,970 in 2025, and nuclear technicians, who typically hold a two-year degree, earned $110,240, both according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here is Dr. Allen’s guidance on how to choose the best path:

Figure Out What Kind of Work You Want

The right school depends on what a student actually wants to do day to day. “Decide what you want to do. Do you want to do more hands-on technical work? If that’s the case, you don’t necessarily need to go to an R1 university like the University of Michigan,” Dr. Allen advises. Two-year degrees are enough to work as nuclear technicians, cost less, and can help students get into this field quickly.

Do Well, and Doors Open

Strong early performance creates room to change direction later. Starting at a two-year school and working as a nuclear technician doesn’t prevent students from pursuing more education later. “Do well at it, because then if you do, you’ll have opportunities to try things. You could do well and then transfer to a different university if you change what you might want to do,” he says.

Don’t Try to Map the Whole Career

Dr. Allen’s career path ran from Navy submarines to a national lab to a deanship, and none of it was planned. “Do not think that you should or can predict what’s going to happen in the next 20, 30 years. Just do things you enjoy, do them well, and people will give you opportunities. No one I know who has had a good career knew that was what they were going to do,” he shares.

Kimmy Gustafson - Writer

With a keen understanding of the challenges and opportunities in higher education, Kimmy Gustafson regularly contributes insightful articles to OnlineEngineeringPrograms.com, providing readers with a comprehensive view on the evolving landscape of engineering education since 2019. She has interviewed many engineering experts on a range of subjects, including geoengineering.

Kimmy has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics such as startups, nonprofits, healthcare, kiteboarding, the outdoors, and higher education. She is passionate about seeing the world and has traveled to over 27 countries. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. When not working, she can be found outdoors, parenting, kiteboarding, or cooking.

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