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Comment by slicktux | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear workers go where the work is…they are not going to wait around when there’s plenty of jobs out there needing their skills.

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Can you explain? I must have the wrong impression, but isn't nuclear-related work specifically in the USA a declining or dying industry? Are there really plenty of jobs when Americans keep posturing away from nuclear? I knew no one from university interested in doing nuclear-related engineering for industry.

That's why there is work, no supply of fresh grads.

There's a lot more to such skills than bombs and power plants:

https://natural-resources.canada.ca/climate-change/medical-i...

Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience, even cases of people who completely washed out of the program.

As for nuclear missile programs in this case, I'm pretty positive that field will still have similar desirable high points. Reliability, understanding procedures, actually understanding procedures to know when/how/why scripts are broken in some cases, and having such socially toxic work environment that even an Amazon job feels like fresh air.

> Data centers will pretty much absorb any person with military nuclear power experience

Could you elaborate why is that? They seem to be unrelated areas.

Search about Microsoft/google/amazon projects for nuclear powered data centers or for AI training

Those still seem to be projects years away from completion (and they also have projects for fusion powered data centers - which are 30 years away, I guess?), yet I've interpreted the chain of comments as "Nuclear workers which were laid off _now_ can easily be absorbed by data centers almost immediately".

At least one the Navy Nuke side, they need to survive what colleges count as 50 to 92 credits in a year and a half. So considerable levels of training.

Anything govt. Nuclear is also going to have "interesting" relationships with procedures. Essentially planning them out, proving them as functional, and being pretrained think about current conditions compared what the procedure thinks is correct. Also trained to analyze when to step into a casualty or recovery procedure properly.

What other jobs? I guess that they could pull a fall-of-the-Soviet-Union scenario and sell their skills to foreign countries? Surely there must be a lot of countries interested in starting their own nuclear weapons programs in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.

> sell their skills to foreign countries?

200 of the world's most experienced nuclear personnel are now unemployed. Yes, these people are the kind that get actively recruited by nation states.

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