Academic stakeholders gather for Partnership for Nuclear Energy meeting

As the nuclear energy renaissance advances, additional workers with nuclear engineering- and nuclear industry-relevant skills are going to be needed to meet the staffing demands of this growing industry.

One of the first steps toward meeting workforce capacity is taking a comprehensive inventory of currently available academic/educational? professional development? programming in nuclear engineering and related fields. ORAU convened 14 nuclear engineering academic institutions from its University Consortium on Tuesday, July 15, 2025, to better understand current offerings and work toward identifying and filling any gaps in the academic landscape. This group of institutions represented a sample of the more than 140 academic institutions that comprise the ORAU Partnership for Nuclear Energy (PNE), a consortium of stakeholders in academia, industry and government working diligently to create high-impact nuclear education and training programs.

“We want to understand what our consortium members are already doing, as well as explore opportunities to partner and collaborate to meet the current and future workforce needs in the nuclear industry across the United States,” said Ashley Stowe, Ph.D., ORAU Chief Research and University Partnerships Officer. “We have a great opportunity to transform the way we teach and train students as well as adults to work in the nuclear industry.”

Among those participating in the meeting were vice presidents of research, department heads and professors engaged in nuclear engineering and related fields from University Consortium member institutions.

“Having a good inventory of what each institution is doing is important to ensure we do not have gaps in the education and training landscape,” said Michelle Goodson, director of the ORAU STEM Accelerator, which manages the PNE. “Awareness of this inventory allows us all to see what institutions are doing, look for best practices from one another and share resources.”

The data from the programmatic inventory included 91 items that will be shared with PNE members for continued discussion.

“ORAU will share the inventory and act as a convener and integrator to ensure the best programmatic methods and structures are used,” Stowe said. “We will also seek to partner with our university partners to fill gaps identified to strengthen the programs and grow capacity across them.”

PNE is an initiative launched by OSA to address the critical need for increasing workforce capacity in the nuclear energy industry. While the July meeting focused on academia, PNE aims to also convene meetings of stakeholders from industries producing large and small nuclear reactors, professional industry organizations, national research laboratories and government agencies.

PNE will release a Nuclear Energy Academic Roadmap later this summer, which will include recommendations for enhancing nuclear career awareness, supporting workforce pipeline development, indemnifying financial resources and optimizing academic resources for K-12 education, vocational-technical schools, two-year and four-year academic institutions, advanced studies and professional development.

A future meeting will bring together representatives from ORAU’s University Consortium and does that just include universities or others too and stakeholders from the nuclear energy industry. “The university partners are keen to sit down with employers to better understand the details of what skillsets they need workers to have,” Stowe said.

Goodson added that a big part of ORAU’s purpose in launching PNE is to encourage institutions to partner and collaborate when they do not have intrinsic need to do so. “The mindset is that we can be better and go further together,” she said.

To learn more about the Partnership for Nuclear Energy, visit https://orau.org/partnerships/stem-accelerator/nuclear/index.html