Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors.The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen.By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent and why many younger workers are fired up about joining the industry. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Craig Piercy: What I like to say is there are the lab coats and there are the hard hats, and so it starts from nuclear engineers and very highly educated and trained scientific and technical professionals, which