Nuclear Engineering Bachelor's Degrees Dropped 25% Between 2012-2022 While the Industry Needs to Nearly Triple Its Workforce by 2050

The number of U.S. students graduating with nuclear engineering bachelor's degrees decreased 25% between 2012 and 2022, hitting the lowest levels in over a decade, at the exact moment when the nuclear workforce is expected to nearly triple by 2050 and 40% of the current workforce is nearing retirement. Why it matters: the education pipeline cannot produce enough nuclear engineers, health physicists, and radiation protection specialists to replace retirees, so reactor operators, national laboratories, and the NRC itself face critical staffing shortages, so licensing reviews and construction oversight take longer due to understaffed regulatory teams, so reactor construction and restart projects face delays and cost overruns from insufficient qualified oversight, so the ambitious targets of the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 become physically impossible to meet without a workforce that does not yet exist. The structural root cause is that decades of nuclear stagnation (no new U.S. reactor orders between 1978 and 2012) convinced a generation of students that nuclear engineering had no career future, universities responded by shrinking or closing nuclear engineering programs, and the recent nuclear renaissance has not yet reversed enrollment trends because students make career decisions 4-6 years before entering the workforce.