nuclear power is making a comeback, but the workforce to deliver it still TBD. From American

Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. The AI boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power.

Microsoft made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania,

while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing new small

modular nuclear reactors. The Biden administration's Department of Energy aims to triple

nuclear energy capacity by 2050. But the sector is going to need a lot more workers to make that

happen. By some estimates, there's a gap of more

than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. We spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American

Nuclear Society, to learn more about what kinds of nuclear workers are in demand.

What I'd like to say is they're the lab coats and they're the hard hats.

And so it starts from nuclear engineers and very highly educated and trained scientific and

technical professionals, which make up, I would say, a small but important percentage of the

overall workforce. But I'd say the bulk is in the skilled

trades, pipe fitters, welders, metalworkers, fabricators, and then you have all the indirect

layers of employment beyond that. So supervisors, security guards, technicians, other people that are

involved in keeping the non-nuclear parts of a nuclear plant running. So it certainly runs the

gamut. Tell me more about how we kind of got to this point where we have this kind of gap to close. I mean,

clearly the demand for nuclear is expanding. What about the kind of the supply of those in the workforce?

What has that been like over the near past? Yeah, if you look at the demographic distribution of the nuclear workforce,

it looks like a double-humped camel.

You have this prime generation that came into the industry in the 1960s and 70s in nuclear's heyday.

And then, of course, after Three Mile Island, you had a significant drop-off in the

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