Nuclear agency goes on hiring spree (Hmmmm......)

[The Straight Story]

Nuclear agency goes on hiring spree

By Karen Rutzick
[e-mail]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is on track to add almost half again as many employees to its staff to keep up with an increasing demand for nuclear power.

The 3,000-person NRC aims to have 4,000 employees by early 2008. To account for attrition, the agency is signing up about 1,300 new employees.

"I've hired 400 of them so far," said James McDermott, chief human capital officer for NRC. "That's unheard of in a small agency like this. That's why our senior managers are so focused on human capital issues."

NRC's upsizing is the outcome of the 2005 energy act, which provides incentives to build nuclear capacity as an alternative to oil. After signing the bill into law in August 2005, President Bush said the country would start building nuclear power plants again by the end of the decade.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=34956&dcn=todaysnews

[bananas]

1. They're going straight for commercial reprocessing

Originally they were going to build a demonstration plant,
but they decided to go skip that phase,
according to this statement from the Federation of American Scientists:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x66745