I wanted this to be a great piece detailing all of the challenges nuclear power must overcome if it wants to cut costs without driving away the young employees it will need to operate for the next 40+ years. Unfortunately after two brief introduction paragraphs, as I tried to decide which reason to get into first, I realized that there were just way too many for one post. Not only would most of you probably exit as soon as you saw the length, but I would get bored and the quality would be prohibitively bad for those who did read the entire thing. As a result, I'm just going to introduce the concept here and I'll spread out the reasons for the industry's possible demise over several posts. To keep you entertained and keep my own sanity during our upcoming refueling outage, I'll make sure to mix in plenty of sports and other random posts as usual. And now the intro to my intro is too long and boring. Anyway, here's the intro:
Nuclear power plants have two types of workers: ridiculously old ones and ridiculously young ones. Nothing in between. Why is that? If you ask an industry lobbyist or college of engineering student ambassador they'll tell you that after the Three Mile Island partial meltdown (which may or may not have been caused by Jimmy Carter blowing hot air up the nation's collective ass) the national attitude toward nuclear power combined with drastically scaled back construction of new plants led few to study the field in college and thus there just aren't that many middle aged workers around. They aren't lying, they honestly believe it when they say it, they just haven't been on the front lines to see the real problem. The real problem is that for a variety of reasons the nuclear industry suffers from an extremely high turnover rate.
But wait, you said many of the workers are extremely old, they obviously haven't turned over! You're right, 3 seconds ago Andy. The truth is, for the most part the really old people have been at the same plant their entire adult lives. They have plenty of stories that make the nuclear industry of the 70's seem more like the Wild Wild West. The stories range from setting up basketball courts and playing pick up games inside the plant to contractors who brought attractive women and mattresses on site during outages and ran a little side business. They marvel at how far they've seen the industry come in terms of safety and continuous operation and they lament how the changes have impacted their personal lives. They stay for many reasons. Some just don't like change, some still believe in the old economy where staying with the same company your whole career meant something, and most just realize that no matter how bad the industry gets it still beats retiring and staying home with their wives all day.
After all of my posts are complete, the lesson is really going to be nothing more than a case study in Economics 101. Everything has decreasing marginal returns. After TMI, nuclear employees started giving up some personal freedoms in return for safer and better operations. Since then nuclear employees have never stopped giving up personal freedoms in return for more and more regulation but as time goes on more and more freedom (even during personal time away from work) is being given up while the asymptote for safer and better operation has been reached. TO BE CLEAR: I AM NOT STATING THAT NUCLEAR POWER CAN'T GET SAFER OR OPERATE BETTER. What I am saying is that it can not get any safer by the currently preferred method of trading it with employees personal lives, in fact it can only get safer through radical innovation that would result from a more engaged, more free workforce. The older workers are going to retire sooner rather than later. Giving young employees the tools and freedom they need to succeed is the only way the nuclear industry is going to be able to sustain itself.
Next installment: The impact of emergency response teams and how we can maintain the ability to respond to severe off hours events without killing employees personal lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment