Even when we are able to attract talented young men and women, the lack of upward mobility or lack of variety in career paths may result in segments of the workforce moving outside the nuclear area. The latest reports provide some important insights that I would like to share with you. First for Nuclear Engineers, the current labor market continues to improve substantially since the mid-1990s. According to the report, this was the third consecutive year that annual salary increases for new nuclear engineering graduates were larger than any of the annual increases experienced between 1991 and 1997. However, the decreasing trend in the number of engineering degrees continued for the fifth consecutive year.
Supply goes down.
But, the decline in the employment of nuclear engineers in the nuclear field that occurred for much of the 1990s appears to have stopped. Do not get me wrong. The picture is better, but still unstable as utilities still face the future effects of deregulation. For health physicists, in 1999 the total number of degrees earned in health physics had decrease of over one-third in just two years. Enrollments also decreased in a similar manner.