School board backs nuclear workforce training effort
The Anderson County Board of Education has stated its interest in partnering with others to help train a workforce for the nuclear industry.
It approved a non-binding resolution at its April 9 meeting regarding these partnerships.
Oak Ridge Associated Universities, a nonprofit organization that promotes collaborations to help the nuclear industry workforce, brought the resolution to the board.
It authorizes the director of schools to look for and negotiate partnerships with other government agencies and “other stakeholders” to “establish and support a collaborative regional approach to educational initiatives focused on workforce readiness.”
“A skilled and trained workforce is essential to meet the current and future needs of industry, and the projected demand for new graduates, as well as up-skilled and re-skilled individuals, cannot be fully met with existing academic programs and resources,” the resolution states.
The resolution comes amid many upcoming nuclear developments in Anderson and Roane counties, led by many different companies in addition to the area’s typical Department of Energy programs and research:
• Kairos Power broke ground on Friday, April 17, to build its commercial scale Hermes 2 reactor in Oak Ridge, which the company says will provide up to 50 megawatts of energy to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• TVA is collaborating with the company Type One Energy to build the first commercial fusion reactor, powered by atoms joining rather than splitting apart, by 2035 somewhere on the Bull Run Fossil Plant site in the Claxton community.
• Another in-progress TVA project in Oak Ridge is the small modular reactor, a new type of nuclear reactor, at the Clinch River site.
• Orano is working on the 750,000 square foot Project IKE uranium enrichment facility, which it calls on its website “the single largest investment in Tennessee’s history,” near Oak Ridge’s Horizon Center Industrial Park. It already has an office in Oak Ridge for the project.
Michelle Goodson, ORAU’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) accelerator promoted the resolution to the school board at the April 9 meeting. She said that Roane County Schools and Oak Ridge City Schools had passed similar resolutions.
“We are excited to collaborate ... and learn what we can do to accelerate pathways to learning through curriculum development, sharing resources such as excellent teachers and then finding (pieces of) equipment that are necessary across all three school systems,” she said.
“We can work together to really meet the needs of the incoming industry as we explode in this excellent nuclear energy renaissance that we’re embarking upon.”
