College students at Kansas State University are increasingly eyeing careers in nuclear technology. So the school has relaunched a bachelor’s degree that originally blazed a trail in the U.S. for nuclear studies.
This news comes at a time when two advanced nuclear companies have announced plans to build reactors in Kansas.
In the 1950s, Kansas State University rolled out one of the first nuclear engineering curriculums in the world. By the early 1960s, the school had its own nuclear reactor facility.
But by the 1990s, student interest in pursuing careers in nuclear power was flagging — perhaps spurred by a broader downturn in public support for this energy source after high-profile incidents such as Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island.
In 1996, K-State discontinued its nuclear major and folded the curriculum into its mechanical engineering program, reducing it to a concentration or a minor.
But today’s students are proving much keener on nuclear technology — a trend showing up in the greater numbers signing up for that concentration.
“We’ve been seeing over the past five years a vast increase,” said Professor Amir Bahadori, who directs the program. “To be honest with you, we’re not entirely sure exactly what’s driving that.”
The faculty’s best guess? A combination of factors.
“Certainly the attention paid to nuclear by AI and tech companies we think is having a role,” Bahadori said, so is interest in generating electricity without burning fossil fuels.
But students have also become more intrigued in the uses of nuclear and radiological technologies outside the energy sector.
“Particularly in the health realm and defense sectors,” he said.
Bringing back the undergraduate major wasn’t a steep climb because K-State always kept its nuclear graduate programs. It also retained its nuclear reactor, one of 25 university research reactors in the country.
Last semester, the university relaunched the nuclear engineering major, which immediately attracted more than 50 students. For context, the U.S. graduated about 450 nuclear engineering majors nationwide in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.
The strong out-of-the-gate number happened mostly because current students at K-State jumped at the chance to change their majors or to add nuclear engineering as a double major.
“We’re starting to see even high school students reach out to our college asking for tours of our building and the reactor,” Bahadori said. “We look forward to helping to alleviate the workforce shortage in nuclear engineering very soon.”
The reactor at K-State is used for teaching and research. Students can train to become reactor operators and then take a Nuclear Regulatory Commission test to earn federal certification.
Nuclear technology trends and jobs
Recent years have seen a flurry of companies working on advanced and modular designs aimed at making it easier to build new nuclear reactors to power data centers and other industries.
Two companies revealed in recent months that they want to build reactors in Kansas.
TerraPower is interested in building a utility-scale plant within utility company Evergy’s Kansas service area. Several counties — including Johnson, Lyon, Greenwood, Reno and Coffey — have signaled to the company that they’re interested in becoming the site of that facility.
Deep Fission, meanwhile, will put a nuclear reactor 1 mile below ground at an industrial park in Parsons, Kansas. The company aims to drill its borehole this spring and have the reactor up and running by the Fourth of July as part of President Donald Trump’s nuclear pilot program. Deep Fission hopes ultimately to provide on-site power for data centers or other large users of energy.
K-State’s reinstated major is Kansas’ only nuclear engineering program. Missouri has one college offering this major — the Missouri University of Science and Technology — and other neighboring states have none.
Nuclear engineers earn a median annual pay of about $128,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says.
The Bureau projects a slight decline in the demand for nuclear engineers over the next decade. It projects that the estimated 800 job openings each year will happen because people are retiring or leaving their positions for other reasons.
But the administration of then-President Joe Biden sought to greatly expand the nation’s nuclear capacity, in part with small, modular reactors.
“Energy demand is expected to grow over the next decade as data centers, electric vehicles and industrial processes all search for a clean and reliable source of power,” the U.S. Department of Energy wrote last year.
More recently, the Trump administration doubled down on the goal of expanding nuclear — and set about shrinking federal regulation of it, prompting alarm from critics.
This summer, an advisory panel on workforce issues told the U.S. Department of Energy that the industry faces hiring challenges including aging workers and not enough people entering the industry. The panel said those challenges would intensify, fueled by rapid progress in nuclear technologies and the advanced training needed for the next generation of reactors.
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
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