Texas has a 3–5 year window to staff more than 10,000 advanced nuclear jobs tied to announced power projects in the state. This demand for talent—concentrated in construction trades, nuclear technicians, operational staff, and four-year technical graduates—far exceeds the capacity of current in-state education and training pipelines and requires years to develop. Without targeted interventions, workforce constraints will become a bottleneck for deployment timelines and economic opportunity. To meet the speed and scale of the near-term demand for talent for these projects:
- Employers will have to move beyond advisory roles and directly invest in nuclear talent development.
- State agencies will need to send clear policy signals regarding nuclear workforce priorities, and
- Labor and Education will need to expand their pipelines, capacity, and programs.
The Nuclear and Radiation Engineering Program at UT Austin held the Texas Nuclear Workforce Development Workshop to align these stakeholders on actionable recommendations designed to complement recent state nuclear workforce development legislation.
Key Findings: Gaps Across the Talent Pipeline
The pre‑workshop survey and participant discussions surfaced several structural weaknesses in Texas’s nuclear workforce ecosystem:
- Fragmentation and lack of coordination: There is no central hub linking education, industry and policy; programs operate in silos and credentials are not portable.
- Technician and apprenticeship shortfalls: Community colleges have generic plant‑operations programs but few nuclear‑specific tracks, and apprenticeships are scattered or dormant.
- Mid‑career bottlenecks: Graduate programs are small, and mid‑career engineers are hard to recruit given competition from semiconductors and aerospace.
- Health‑physics gap: Only one university surveyed offers a health‑physics degree; radiation‑protection programs are undersized or inactive.
- Weak K‑12 pipeline: Nuclear is nearly invisible in statewide STEM outreach, with Texas A&M’s ReCENT program as the lone standout.
These gaps create misalignment across tiers (craft trades, technicians, engineers), across regions and across agencies. Educational programs are concentrated in urban areas like Austin and Houston, while future reactors are planned in rural Gulf Coast and Panhandle sites. Texas lacks a shared demand forecast and tri‑agency implementation track, causing fragmented funding and duplication.
Workshop Outcomes: A Roadmap for Action
The workshop outcomes were laser-focused on actionable recommendations to address the acute workforce cliff Texas is approaching. It lays out a sequence of strategic actions organized by stakeholder group, impact, and feasibility Texas can take today to address the talent supply gap, then builds a plan of action for near-term next steps emphasizing time is of the essence. Collectively, these actions aim to “de‑risk” advanced nuclear deployment by ensuring the right skills are available when and where they’re needed. The report argues that a strong, dedicated workforce is the best way to reduce schedule delays and cost overruns.
The workshop’s supporting documents are available for anyone who wants to dig deeper:
- White paper: Cultivating Homegrown Nuclear Talent in Texas- Workforce Development Recommendations for Advanced Nuclear Deployment—the complete report summarizing findings and recommendations.
- Existing assets read‑ahead: An evergreen catalog of current workforce programs, with survey results and ecosystem maps.
UT Austin invites industry partners, educators, policymakers and the public to join this effort. General questions and additional nuclear workforce development resources can be directed to Danielle Zigon,
