SUMMERLIN, NEV. Like other branches of the federal government, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has a graying workforce and a pressing need to attract new blood in the coming years, speakers said here Thursday at the Radwaste Summit.
The crowd at the summit “looks fabulous, I must say, but none of us is getting any younger,” said Tammy Monday, vice president of sales and business development at Studsvik, during a workforce session at the annual conference, which is sponsored by ExchangeMonitor Publications.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management oversees roughly 25,000 federal and contractor employees, said Kristen Ellis, acting director of regulatory intergovernmental affairs at the DOE cleanup office.
“However, we are facing a critical challenge,” Ellis said during her remote, pre-recorded presentation. The nuclear cleanup program is expected to continue for at least another fifty years. But a significant number of employees are eligible, or about to be eligible, for retirement, she added.
As of Oct. 25, 27% of the federal employees at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) were eligible for retirement, according to data compiled by the agency’s human capital office, an agency spokesperson said Thursday. More than a third, 36%, could retire by Jan. 1, 2024. Just over half of the cleanup office’s federal workforce will be eligible to call it a career by Jan. 1, 2028.
Many EM contractors have a similar challenge.
Probably 25% of the 1,900 people who work for UCOR, the Amentum-Jacobs remediation contractor at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee are about 60 years old and legally eligible to start drawing down their 401-K individual retirement plans, the company’s President and CEO Ken Rueter on the sidelines of the conference.
“Cultivating a workforce of young professionals in the radioactive waste industry,” is a top priority for EM, Ellis said in her video presentation Thursday.
“We are also expanding our recruitment strategies and leadership development programs,” Nicole Nelson-Jean, EM’s associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations, said Thursday in her own pre-recorded presentation to the conference.
The DOE cleanup office is trying a number of things to build a pipeline of new hires, the EM speakers said. This includes encouraging public school students to pursue fields in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), recruiting future employees at schools serving tribal nations as well as historically black colleges and universities, they said. There is also an active program to encourage former military veterans to start new careers in nuclear environmental cleanup, Ellis said.
Rueter said UCOR has brought on several hundred new hires in the past six years or so thanks to apprenticeship programs with trade unions and partnering with a local community college.