A Plan to Rebuild the NDT Pipeline

Ask nuclear nondestructive evaluation (NDE) practitioners directly when they plan to leave the field, and the answer is stark. In a 2024 EPRI survey [1] of 82 nuclear-sector NDE professionals, 37% percent said they expect to retire by 2030. Another 24% said they'll follow within the decade after that—a combined 61% of the nuclear NDE workforce gone within 16 years.

That's one industry sector's data, gathered directly from the people making the decision to retire—about as close to ground truth as workforce research gets. The same survey asked those practitioners a more pointed question: Do you believe the industry will have enough NDE personnel to meet future needs? Sixty percent said no.

That's not an outside analyst's projection. That's the people doing the work, telling the industry directly that they don't think the pipeline behind them is going to hold. It also lines up with what the broader industry is seeing: the ASNT Foundation's 2025 Economic Impact of NDT report [2] found that 42% of the US nondestructive testing (NDT) workforce is now 45 or older, a share the report itself calls “a demographic turning point.”

This is the backdrop against which the ASNT Board of Directors considered and approved a new National Apprenticeship Program earlier this summer.