Learning on the job — and earning competitive pay — at the Savannah River Site

The Savannah River Site, run by the U.S. Department of Energy, is looking to hire — and help train — 9,000 new employees over the next five years.

What if I told you there is a place with warm winters where they’re hiring like crazy — even though you have zero experience in the industry? 

“We have about 9,000 hires over the next five years, so the demand is huge,” said Richard Sprague, senior vice president of Environment, Safety, Health & Quality at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.

He pointed to the key qualification he wants, something that doesn’t fit neatly on a resume: “Discipline.”

Discipline, as in, your act is together and you do what you say you’re doing. Beyond that, you need U.S. citizenship and a high school diploma or a GED for a job located where South Carolina and Georgia meet. That doesn’t mean you’re in, but you’ll be considered. 

And here’s the thing: They pay you as they train. Julia Shealy teaches chemistry, physics and more at Augusta Technical College, one of the campuses providing some of the classwork for jobs in “mostly operations, but all kinds of different jobs.”

“It’s fun to connect with [students] over this stuff,” she said, “especially when they find that I do have a background working with my hands and being in a sense of the word ‘blue collar,’ just as much as they are.'”

Now here’s the part where we go into detail tell you who is doing all this hiring. In a government-issue shuttle van, we’re guided through a dense forest of loblolly and longleaf woven with miles of curlicue steam pipes for power and heat. These 300 square miles — just about the same size as all of New York City’s boroughs — is the Savannah River Site, overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy. It was first set up in the Cold War to make materials like plutonium for nuclear weapons. 

The site was created more than 50 years ago. These days, it’s a place where you’ll want to do a lot of things carefully — from dimming down highly toxic plutonium into something no longer weapons-grade to processing spent fuel rods pulled from nuclear reactors. There’s also a national laboratory.  

“This is what I really love about this program, is we bring them in as full-time employees. So that means you’re getting pay, you’re getting vacation, you’re getting a 401(k),” said BooBoo Roberts, apprenticeship school program manager for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.

There’s a part-time system for people working on college degrees, but she’s talking about the full-time program that now has a hundred employee-apprentices.

After realizing college wasn’t his thing, Stephen Young Jr. spent 25 years working at a tire factory where production was intense. “Everything had to be done as fast as possible. We needed it yesterday,” he said.

Here at Savannah River speed is not the thing: “If you’re in a rush, you’re doing it wrong. A mistake might potentially get somebody hurt or way worse.”

Lauren Olly was a bartender and server and is partly through the eight-month program.

“We’re getting a good nuclear fundamentals certificate,” she said. “And then like today, I just learned how to put on a respirator.”

“It’s a good bit of math,” she went on. “But I mean, it’s not too hard. And hopefully, you know, when we’re out on the field, the engineers will do the math for us.”

Terrence Tillman, with a long career as a restaurant manager and bartender, is his 50s. But when he and his wife had a serious car accident, he felt it was time for a change. 

“So this program makes it where you can totally put one down, pick this one up, and you have income and education while you’re doing it. So you don’t have to fear and it takes away the stress,” he said.

For security reasons, the people in the apprenticeship have access to confidential details about the actual work. The starting salary for most in the program is in the range of $70,000 — just about what they pay the sheriff in the surrounding county here.

“At the end of the day,” said Jermaine Whirl, president of the partner campus, Augusta Technical College, “it’s really about: How do you move individuals from one social economic mobility status to another?”