WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR NUCLEAR ENGINEERING EDUCATION-THE NEXT TEN YEARS

As one concerned with the education of nuclear engineers to meet the future demands of industry and government, I am continually scanning the horizon for signs that will tell me what our graduates will be expected to know five to ten years hence. In this rapidly advancing technology this is not an easy task. Cognizance must be given to the needs of the customers for our product. However, these needs do not in themselves dictate the curriculum, for each has its own mission to perform which in certain instances can be quite varied and present a rather narrow educational viewpoint. In developing educational programs the educator must remember that often the technologies being practiced today will be be outmoded by the time the engineering graduate begins to make effective contributions to the profession. In trying to look ahead I am going to look back at the development of nuclear engineering education. Prior to 1956 nuclear engineering was an unknown discipline in our colleges of engineering. Most of the persons being trained in this technology were being trained in the national laboratories under security wraps. Since the nuclear technology developed during and shortly after the war was not available to universities and colleges, full fledged educational programs were nonexistent. In 1955 President Eisenhower .'inrioii.iced hir Atoms for Peace Program which threw open everything relating to reactors. This was a major step in declassifying a very important and big portion of nuclear energy information, with the expectation that reactor technology was ripe for economic exploitation. This was not immediately true and it wasn't until about 1964 that electrical energy from nuclear sources became competitive with that derived from fossile fuels. As a result of declassification textbooks were written and laboratory manuals were developed. With the assistance of educational grants from the federal government reactors began to appear on university campuses and degree programs in nuclear engineering began to imerge. There is no doubt that the engineering graduate from these programs, hired by industry and the national laboratories, contributed greatly to shortening the time for the realization of economic nuclear power.