How Many People Does It Take to Build and Run 10 New Nuclear Plants?

Somebody asked me a simple question this week: how many people does it take to operate an AP1000?

The short answer is about 383. That is roughly one-third fewer staff than a conventional nuclear plant of comparable size — the result of passive safety systems that eliminate entire categories of pumps, valves, and the surveillance burden that comes with them. An independent study by INPO confirmed that number years before the first AP1000 ever came online.

But the more interesting question is what happens when you multiply that by ten.

Because that is exactly what Westinghouse is planning. Ten new AP1000 units in the United States. Construction starting by 2030. And in March 2026, PricewaterhouseCoopers published an independent economic analysis of what that would mean for the American workforce.

The numbers are worth sitting with.

The Construction Phase

We have a real-world benchmark for AP1000 construction workforce. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia — just two reactors — peaked at more than 9,000 workers on site. The Department of Energy confirmed it. Bechtel confirmed it. Georgia Power confirmed it.

Nine thousand workers. Two units.

Scale that to ten units and you are looking at roughly 45,000 construction workers at peak — welders, pipefitters, ironworkers, module fabricators, I&C installers, nuclear QA inspectors, riggers, and concrete specialists. People with specific certifications and documented training, not general construction labor off the street.

The PwC study puts the broader figure at 44,300 jobs annually across the full 13-year construction phase, when you count direct, indirect, and induced economic activity. That includes the supply chain — the valve manufacturers, the specialty steel producers, the instrumentation suppliers, the logistics networks that feed a project that size.

That last number deserves its own paragraph. According to Julie Kozeracki at the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, building just two AP1000s at Vogtle required training approximately 13,000 technicians. Not hiring them from an existing pool. Training them — because the pool did not exist.

That is what it costs to rebuild a workforce after three decades of not building nuclear plants in this country.

Bechtel, which completed Units 3 and 4, drove construction costs down 30 percent from Unit 3 to Unit 4. The workforce learned. The supply chain matured. The next ten plants will not start from zero the way Vogtle did — but they will still need tens of thousands of trained workers, and those workers do not appear from nowhere.

The Operational Phase

Once those plants are running, the workforce picture changes — but it does not get smaller.

PwC projects 22,500 jobs annually once the full fleet is operational, sustained over an 80-year plant lifetime. Of those, roughly 5,000 are direct plant positions — the operators, maintenance technicians, health physics professionals, engineers, and support staff who keep ten reactors running day to day.

The Number Nobody Talks About

Here is where it gets interesting for workforce planners.

Every nuclear plant has an outage. Once or twice a year, the reactor shuts down for refueling and maintenance. For a few weeks, the site workforce surges dramatically as contractors arrive to perform work that cannot be done at power.

Crane Nuclear — a specialized supplier of safety-critical valves and valve diagnostics — published data on this earlier this year. Their teams alone deploy 40 to 150 highly trained workers per outage. Across the full site, the total maintenance workforce during an outage can reach 800 to 1,000 workers.

Per plant.

Ten plants means ten outages per year. Some of them will overlap. The demand for qualified outage workers — pipefitters, valve technicians, I&C specialists, radiation protection technicians, welders with nuclear certifications — is not a one-time surge. It is a permanent, rotating, annual demand that runs alongside the steady-state operational workforce.

Where Does That Workforce Come From?

That is the question the industry has not answered yet.

The existing nuclear workforce is aging. The generation trained in the 1970s and 1980s is retiring. The construction gap between the last wave of plants and Vogtle — roughly 30 years — meant the pipeline of trained nuclear workers nearly dried up. Vogtle proved what it costs to rebuild it from scratch.

We do not have 30 years this time. Construction on the next ten AP1000s is scheduled to begin by 2030. That means the training pipeline needs to be producing workers now — not when the first concrete is poured.

I spent 45 years in nuclear. Thirty-five of those years were at TVA Browns Ferry. I have trained reactor operators, I have managed outages, and I have watched the industry fail to solve this problem by waiting until the last minute. It does not work that way. You cannot recruit a valve technician in the fall who will be qualified to work a spring outage. The training takes time. The documentation takes time. The mentorship takes time.

The pipeline starts before the job posting. It starts in a classroom.

That is why NUCLEUS exists. Online, instructor-led, built on DOE Fundamentals Handbooks, taught by a licensed Senior Reactor Operator. No prerequisites. Open to high school students, homeschool families, and adult career changers who never got the invitation. One course at a time, building the foundation that makes everything else possible.

One of those future welders or valve technicians or reactor operators might be sitting in a classroom right now with no idea nuclear is even an option. You can change that. BWRx Studio's Sponsor a Seat program puts deserving young people into NUCLEUS when the tuition is out of reach.

The workforce doesn't build itself. It starts here. Learn more at bwrx.studio/blog/blog-post-012.html.