Because the nation is searching for alternatives to fossil fuels, the nuclear power industry is… Because the nation is searching for alternatives to fossil fuels, the nuclear power industry is seeing unprecedented growth, and that translates into jobs for college graduates. John Goossen, director of the science and technology department at Westinghouse Electric Company, told students at Pitt’s Nuclear Night yesterday that this growth is occurring across the board. Of the 11,000 workers his company employs, 1,300 were hired in the last fiscal year, Goossen said. The event also featured speeches from energy executives from Bechtel Bettis Inc., FirstEngery Nuclear Operating Co. and Westinghouse Electric Co. But the event’s main speaker was Dale Klein, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency created by Congress in 1974 to regulate the use of radioactive materials in the United States.’ He referred to the commission as ‘the best place to work in federal government,’ partially because of its growing employment opportunities. Advances within the field can be attributed to greater measures taken by commercial nuclear power plants to provide clean sources of energy for the country.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ Klein said he is ‘convinced that the future of this country will be shaped in very distinctive ways.” One of these changes, he said, is the inevitable pull away from notoriously dirty sources of energy like coal, oil and gas. In smaller countries, where energy options are less numerous, the nuclear energy movement is slightly further along. For example, Klein said, ‘France gets 80 percent of its energy from nuclear sources.’ The United States currently imports a great amount of its energy, a fact that may change after the next presidential election.’ Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain have made it a priority to wean the United States off of foreign fuel. However, Klein said that the nuclear industry must first convince the American public of its value. ‘They don’t understand how energy is generated,’ said Klein. ‘We need to educate the public on what our real [energy] choices are.’ Many people, the executives said, believe that nuclear energy is dangerous and unstable, but the industry has undergone an almost complete transformation in the past 50 years. And, when compared with oil or coal, nuclear power plants can extract a far greater amount of energy from splitting a single uranium atom than from forming a molecule of carbon dioxide. Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering began offering its nuclear engineering program last year, because there were more jobs available than there were students studying it. Pitt has access to unique opportunities, many of the night’s speakers said, with commercial nuclear companies located right outside of the city. FirstEnergy Corp., for instance, has a facility in Shippingport, Pa., which currently employs 850 people.’ The company has three separate plants and serves approximately 4.6 million customers across the eastern United States. Peter Sena III, vice president of FirstEnergy, said he remembers when only 40 years ago the nuclear energy was described as the ‘great white elephant,’ about to reach its end.’ The ‘nuclear renaissance,’ as specialists within the field have come to call it, is still young, and some suggest that perhaps, in the past, we didn’t know as much about nuclear energy as we should have. Sena said, ‘Nuclear power is different. It’s special. And it has to be treated as such.’