Power Without People

The Mountain West is in the middle of a nuclear renaissance. Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming are all racing to expand nuclear energy—but the country may not have enough workers to keep up, especially in the specialized field of radiation safety.

That was the warning at the 2026 John Horan Health Physics Symposium, which drew national experts and state and federal leaders to the University of Utah in April.

The numbers are daunting. To meet expansion goals, the U.S. will need 184,000 more workers in the nuclear industry—plus another 250,000 for construction—says Wendi Secrist, executive director of the Idaho Workforce Development Council, citing a 2025 Department of Energy study. And it’s not just engineers: electricians and technicians matter just as much.

Nowhere is the gap wider than in radiation safety, or health physics—the science of protecting people from radiation. The pool of experts has been shrinking for decades; health physics degrees fell sharply in the mid-1990s, when federal support for the field was cut, and never recovered, leaving only a handful of accredited programs, some at risk of closing.

“Nuclear energy in the U.S. has an excellent safety record with over 60 years of operational experience. This is in no small part due to a workforce of dedicated and highly trained radiation safety professionals,” says Frederick Monette, executive director of Environmental Health and Safety at the U and a board-certified health physicist with over 35 years of experience.

“If everything goes as planned, there’s going to be a hundred-odd new reactors in the next 10 years,” says Tom Johnson, health physics program director at Colorado State University. “We are in no way prepared for that.”

Speakers say the fix won’t happen on its own. “It’s not going to just work itself out,” Secrist says. “We have to be intentional.”