EXPOSED
Nuclear technicians spend real hours physically inside plants and labs — swiping contamination surveys, drawing coolant and effluent samples, calibrating and staging radiation detection instruments, escorting workers through controlled areas — and none of that is close to being roboticized in a hardened, high-consequence environment. What is exposed is the paperwork half of the job: trending dose data, filling radiological work permits, generating shift logs, writing routine survey and effluent reports, and flagging out-of-band readings, all of which software already does or will do. Certification (ANSI/ANS-3.1, NRR health physics tech quals, site-specific quals) plus a heavy NRC/utility procedural culture slows change more than the technology does; the shield is regulatory, not physical, and could be rewritten.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $82,080 → $110,240 +7.4% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-7.7% 6,000 → 5,500 on the projections basis
Shrinking, but not obviously because of AI
The BLS projects -7.7% by 2034, but at 50/100 this work is only moderately exposed — not the profile of a job current AI can simply do. Occupations shrink for many reasons, and the score does not point at automation as this one's cause.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~700 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
DecontaminatorGamma OperatorSystems OperatorRadiation MonitorAuxiliary OperatorEquipment OperatorNuclear TechnicianFacilities OperatorHot-Cell TechnicianAccelerator OperatorOperation SpecialistRadiation TechnicianCell Support OperatorNon Licensed OperatorOperations TechnicianAccelerator TechnicianEnergy Systems OperatorElectric System OperatorNuclear Station OperatorRadiation Safety OfficerRadiochemical TechnicianGamma Facilities OperatorLicensed Nuclear OperatorMetallographic Technician
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Roughly half the shift is field work a machine can't yet do — smear surveys behind a valve gallery, whole-body counter setups, source checks on portal monitors, sampling primary coolant through a hot-lab hood — but the other half is dose trending, RWP writeups, log entries and effluent report generation that software already handles, which is what pulls this to 11 rather than the 15+ a purely hands-on trade would get.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work inside radiological control areas in anti-Cs, respirator or airline hood, in refuel outage heat and cramped containment penetrations where geometry, background and contamination change hour to hour — that's uncontrolled by any robotics standard — and it lands at 14 rather than higher because a meaningful share of hours are back in the count room, at the RP desk, or at a workstation.
Certification preferred, not legally required You hold real quals — ANSI/ANS-3.1 health physics tech certification, site-specific requals, sometimes NRC-recognized RCT cards — and you sign surveys and RWPs, but the licence that legally matters belongs to the plant and the certified Radiation Protection Manager or licensed operator above you, so at 9 the credential gates who does the work without making you personally the licensed accountable party.
Meaningful discretion Procedures and ALARA plans script most of the day, but you make live calls that matter — stop-work when a dose rate climbs mid-job, whether an alarm is real or a source-check artifact, whether a smear result means a contamination event or lab error, what stay-time to give a crew — and 12 rather than 15 because those calls escalate fast to RP supervision and the control room rather than ending with you.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (11/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (9/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (4/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (12/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 25 of this occupation's 50 points (50%).
Embodiment (14/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Ship Engineers SAFE
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 65/100, still EXPOSED.
SMR/advanced-reactor licensing (NuScale, X-energy, Kairos applications) settling minimum radiation-protection staffing per unit as an explicit license condition rather than leaving it to owner discretion — the same fight now running over minimum licensed operator staffing per 10 CFR 50.54(m) exemption requests. If techs get a floor written in, the shield hardens; if SMR staffing exemptions are granted broadly, it erodes instead.
Genuine two-tier job: if trending, log generation, effluent report drafting and out-of-band flagging are absorbed by software, the residual day is unplanned-work ALARA planning, hot-particle and smearable-contamination judgment, instrument response troubleshooting in high-field areas, and job coverage — work with no clean digital substitute. Task-mix shift alone raises this without any rule change.
Decommissioning workload growth (Indian Point, Palisades restart work, Diablo Canyon lifetime extension surveys) shifting the national task mix toward MARSSIM final status surveys and characterization — dense, non-repeating, in-field measurement in degraded and unmapped geometries, which is the least roboticizable part of the occupation.
An NRC rule or license-condition change (e.g., in revision of Regulatory Guide 8.2/8.8 implementation or 10 CFR 20 recordkeeping requirements) that names a qualified/certified health physics technician as the individual who must review and sign radiological survey records, RWPs, and dose-assignment entries generated by software — making the certification the legal signature rather than a staffing convention. Watch also for ANSI/ANS-3.1 revision language on attestation for machine-generated radiological records.
Formal, individually held stop-work / suspend-entry authority for the RP technician written into the site radiological protection program and collective bargaining agreements (UWUA/IBEW utility locals), so the on-scene tech owns the containment-entry or dose-extension call rather than relaying a recommendation to an engineer.
The limit. No realistic route to trust_premium: the buyer is a utility or national lab, not a person choosing a human, and procurement optimizes cost per survey. Also note the two liability levers point the same way as the SMR staffing-exemption fight — the same NRC process that could write a floor is currently being asked to waive one, so the shield is genuinely bidirectional here.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 470 | $99,990 -9% |
| Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC | 260 | $108,210 -2% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 100 | $171,470 +56% |
| Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC | 90 | $114,910 +4% |
| Birmingham, AL | 60 | $126,930 +15% |
| Knoxville, TN | 60 | $78,850 -28% |
| Richmond, VA | 60 | $122,210 +11% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 50 | $113,390 +3% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 100 | $171,470 +56% |
| Birmingham, AL | 60 | $126,930 +15% |
| Richmond, VA | 60 | $122,210 +11% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 50. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.