There is a significant demand for nuclear engineers in Ontario, where there will be a sustained presence of nuclear generating capacity for a long time to come. The nuclear power plants need to be maintained. They need to be overhauled to extend their lifespan. The minute you need to keep those plants running, you need nuclear engineers to plan over 10 to 20 years how they're going to do the maintenance, upgrading, and the transformation that will give them another 10 to 20 years.
Usually they do it in blocks of about 25 years, so there is a need to replace the people who are being phased out, and that need is currently met in two ways. In the early 2000s, a program was created jointly with NSERC and the entire nuclear industry, primarily centred in Ontario. It's called the University Network of Excellence in Nuclear Engineering. This program created a series of chairs that were financed very generously, in part by industry and in part by NSERC. It aimed at creating the succession planning for nuclear engineers at the master's and doctoral level.
It was recognized that to train the bachelors, first you needed to get the experts at the doctoral and master's level who could contribute both to the industry and to educating the future generation of engineers.
We are now at the point where a few universities—very few—including McMaster, Queen's, U of T, and UOIT, where I am located, have the capacity to teach nuclear engineering to young graduates of the bachelor level. At UOIT we have the only stand-alone nuclear engineering program in the country.
What has been done is meeting the supply.