InvestmentsAsk most people what an SMR project brings to a town and they picture one thing: construction workers in hard hats. That’s real, but it’s also just the loudest part of a much bigger hiring wave. The current build-out touches forge shops in Illinois, community colleges in Wyoming, and federal offices in Rockville, Maryland, long before a single reactor generates a watt. U.S. nuclear workforce models point to growth from roughly 100,000 workers today to something closer to 375,000 by 2050, and SMR projects are the fastest-growing slice of that curve.
Here are five categories of jobs actually showing up on hiring boards and DOE award lists right now, ranked from the ones you can see from the road to the ones you’d never guess are nuclear at all.
Construction trades, the first and biggest wave
Every SMR project starts as a construction site, and that phase is where headcount peaks hardest. TerraPower’s Natrium plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming expects a peak construction workforce of 1,600, covering everything from civil engineers and heavy equipment operators to concrete batchers and electricians. Across the Atlantic, Rolls-Royce SMR’s Wylfa site in Wales is projected to support up to 8,000 jobs during its build phase, with roles like machine operators, groundworkers, and site engineers leading the earliest hiring rounds.
What makes SMR construction different from a typical industrial build is the paperwork layer stacked on top of the physical work. Nuclear-specific quality assurance standards mean even a standard electrician or welder role usually requires additional certification once nuclear-grade materials enter the picture. Roles filling up fastest right now include:
Project engineers and schedulers, who translate the modular build sequence into a workable site plan
QA/QC managers, tasked with documentation standards ordinary commercial construction doesn’t require
NQA-1 certified welders and inspectors, a credential most general contractors don’t carry
Commissioning specialists, who test systems before a reactor is cleared to operate
Superintendents with prior nuclear or heavy industrial experience, consistently the hardest role to fill
That last gap is worth sitting with for a second. Nuclear pay is genuinely higher than comparable commercial construction work, largely because so few people currently hold the required nuclear documentation and quality-control experience. If you’re already working data centers, heavy civil, or industrial QA/QC, that’s the fastest lane into an SMR build.
Permanent plant operators, the jobs that outlast the construction crews
Once the cranes leave, a much smaller but far more durable set of jobs remains. A typical 300-megawatt SMR unit needs roughly 150 to 250 permanent employees across engineering, operations, maintenance, and skilled trades, according to industry workforce estimates. TerraPower expects more than 250 permanent Kemmerer positions once Natrium is operating, many at six-figure salaries. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is projected to add more than 300 permanent jobs, while X-energy’s Xe-100 project at Dow’s Seadrift, Texas facility anticipates around 100 permanent positions once operational.
These roles skew toward long careers rather than project-based work, which is exactly what makes them the backbone of a host community’s economy:
Reactor operators and control room staff, requiring NRC-licensed operator certification
Instrumentation and controls (I&C) technicians, maintaining the sensors and safety systems
Radiation protection technicians, monitoring exposure and site safety day to day
Maintenance and mechanical trades, handling the ongoing upkeep a reactor needs over decades
Which of these roles matters most to your own town probably depends less on the reactor vendor and more on whether the site is a new build or a coal conversion, since coal-to-nuclear projects can often retrain existing plant staff into a meaningful share of these positions rather than hiring an entirely new workforce.
Manufacturing and supply chain jobs, hundreds of miles from any reactor
This is the category most people miss entirely, because it doesn’t show up near a construction site. It shows up in machine shops and forges that may be nowhere near a planned reactor. In May 2026, the Department of Energy awarded more than $94 million to eight American manufacturers specifically to close SMR component bottlenecks. American Forgemasters in New Castle, Pennsylvania received $2.9 million for a new furnace to produce large component forgings for Gen III+ SMRs. Scot Forge in Spring Grove, Illinois got $12.3 million for a vertical turning lathe and gantry milling machine to manufacture large reactor components domestically. Global Nuclear Fuel Americas in Wilmington, North Carolina received $3 million to add a second fuel rod fabrication line.
None of those three towns hosts an SMR. All three now employ people building the parts that make one possible. That’s the pattern worth watching if you don’t live anywhere near a proposed reactor site:
Nuclear-qualified forging and casting operators, a skillset the industry has been short on for 30 years
Precision machinists trained on nuclear tolerance standards, tighter than most commercial manufacturing
Fuel fabrication technicians, needed at facilities scattered across a handful of states regardless of where reactors get built
Materials inspectors and NDE (non-destructive examination) technicians, verifying components before they ship
If you’re trying to track which manufacturers are actually hiring against these DOE-backed contracts versus which ones are still waiting on firm orders, that’s exactly the kind of company-by-company detail SMRbrief Pro keeps updated as new awards and supplier announcements land.
Teaching and training roles, the quiet growth category
Somebody has to train the 150 to 250 people who’ll eventually staff each new plant, and that’s created an entirely separate hiring wave inside community colleges and technical schools. Western Wyoming Community College was awarded $1.9 million to launch a Generation IV Nuclear Plant Technician program, the first of its kind in the state, built specifically around Natrium’s local hiring needs. TerraPower’s own 35,000-square-foot Kemmerer Training Center, built around a full-scale plant simulator, will train not just its Wyoming workforce but operators for future Natrium plants worldwide.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects roughly 500 nuclear technician job openings annually over the next decade nationally, a mix of new positions and retirements, which means the instructors, lab coordinators, and curriculum developers building these programs are themselves a growing job category:
Nuclear technology instructors at community and technical colleges
Simulator and lab coordinators running hands-on training facilities
Apprenticeship program managers, coordinating between developers and local trade schools
Workforce development grant administrators, managing the federal and state funding behind these programs
This is probably the least visible job category on this list, and also the one most likely to exist in a town that has no reactor plans whatsoever, since regional community colleges are positioning themselves as training hubs for an entire multi-state labor market.
Regulatory, safety, and specialized professional roles
The last category sits mostly in Rockville, Maryland, home to NRC headquarters, but its ripple effects reach state energy offices and utility legal teams everywhere. The 2024 ADVANCE Act pushed the NRC to expand hiring under its existing Atomic Energy Act authorities specifically to keep pace with advanced reactor applications, and the agency has been adding dedicated review teams to provide continuity across licensing reviews.
The jobs here look less like a hard hat and more like a law degree or an engineering PhD:
Reactor safety and licensing engineers, reviewing applications like TVA’s Clinch River permit
NRC attorneys and policy analysts, handling enforcement actions and rulemaking tied to the ADVANCE Act
Field inspectors, visiting sites to verify compliance once construction begins
State energy office staff, increasingly tasked with coordinating siting, permitting, and community benefit agreements as more states compete for SMR projects
Do you actually need to live near Rockville to land one of these roles? Not necessarily. States actively courting SMR developers, including Wyoming, Tennessee, Texas, and increasingly several in the Southeast, are building out their own energy office staff to manage exactly this kind of project pipeline, which means the regulatory job market is spreading well beyond the NRC’s own headcount.
Whether any of these five categories lands near you probably depends less on whether your state gets an actual reactor and more on whether it lands a forge contract, a training grant, or a state energy office expansion instead. Worth checking your own state’s economic development office for SMR-related grants before assuming the jobs are all happening somewhere else.