Keep reactors running safely, and design the next ones. A small field with long, stable careers.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $95,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $62,000 at the lower end to about $151,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$36,500 to $86,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a licence or registration before you can work.
Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$95,000
Lower end
$62,000
Upper end
$151,000
Job Bank's national median is $45.67 an hour, about $95,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower end ($30) and upper end ($72.49) are the bottom and top of the wage range for the whole group, which Job Bank shares with mechanical engineers. Most of these jobs are in Ontario, with a smaller cluster in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan.
$46.42 an hour
Job Bank's median for the group in Ontario, about $97,000 a year
Saskatchewan's median is $50 and New Brunswick's $45.67. Utilities hire a lot of their former summer and co-op students, so a work term at a station is the single best way in.
Roughly, all in
$36,500 to $86,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is four years of engineering tuition at a cheaper Canadian school, the professional practice exam, and the fee to apply for a P.Eng (professional engineer) licence. The high end is five years at a pricier school plus the first years of annual licence dues. Your security clearance is paid for by the employer, so it costs you nothing but a clean record and some waiting. The industry funds a lot of scholarships and paid co-op terms because its workforce is ageing, so many students pay well under the low figure in practice.
The industry funds a lot of scholarships and co-op placements because the workforce is ageing and it needs replacements.
A real pension
Large nuclear utilities usually offer a defined-benefit pension, one that pays a set amount every month for life.
Job stability
Stations run for decades and refurbishment projects last years. Outages, when a reactor is shut down for maintenance, bring overtime.
Paid training and licence fees
Health, dental and strong time off after a few years
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Most people arrive through mechanical, electrical, chemical or nuclear engineering, then learn the reactor on the job.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Calculus, Advanced Functions, Physics and Chemistry. Physics is the core of this one.
Accredited engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Nuclear engineering where it is offered, otherwise mechanical, electrical or chemical engineering with nuclear electives.
Get into the industry
Months
A co-op term or a first job at a station, a reactor vendor, an engineering firm or the federal regulator. Expect a security check.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years (2 in Quebec)
About four years of supervised work (24 months in Quebec), plus a lot of station specific training on reactor systems and radiation protection.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After about 4 years (2 in Quebec)
Pass the law and ethics exam and submit your experience record. Some senior station roles also need extra certification from the federal regulator.
Physics
Required, and closer to the daily work here than in most fields.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Chemistry
Required. Reactor coolant chemistry is a real specialty.
Computer science
Optional. Safety analysis runs on simulation code.
You need a provincial engineering licence like any other engineer, and everything you touch is also controlled by the CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), the federal regulator that licenses every reactor, uranium mine and radioactive source in the country. That means paperwork, procedures and audits. People who like clear rules thrive here. People who want to move fast and improvise do not.
Ontario Tech University
In Oshawa, beside the Darlington station. It calls itself Canada's nuclear training ground and runs nuclear engineering degrees.
McMaster University
Hamilton, home of a research reactor used for teaching and medical isotope production.
Other engineering schools
Toronto, Queen's, Waterloo, Western, New Brunswick and Polytechnique Montreal all offer nuclear courses inside other engineering degrees.
Graduate study
A master's in nuclear engineering is common for design and safety analysis roles.
Quebec has had no working nuclear power plant since 2012, so after a 2 year CEGEP (public college) diploma the route is a physics engineering degree with a nuclear focus, and the licence comes from the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, the Quebec order of engineers).
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Take Secondary V math in the Technical and Scientific or the Science sequence, plus Secondary V chemistry and physics. All three are required for the Science DEC (Diploma of College Studies).
Science DEC at a CEGEP
2 years
The 2 year Science program (200.B1). In English at Dawson and the other English colleges. Engineering schools look for its calculus, physics and chemistry courses and your R score (the Quebec college ranking mark).
Bachelor's in physics engineering
4 years
Polytechnique Montréal's génie physique (physics engineering), in French, offers a 12 credit nuclear engineering specialization in the final year. The program has one required paid 4 month internship.
Become a CPI (candidate to the engineering profession)
Before or right after graduating
Apply to the order once you have 60 university credits or your degree, $180. Joining the program costs $520 plus tax, half price within 6 months of graduating.
24 months of supervised work, then the exam
At least 2 years, at most 5
Work under an engineer you declare to the order. Paid internships done after 60 credits can count. Add 25 to 30 hours of online training ($345) and a multiple choice exam ($285, 60% to pass).
Show French, get the permit
End of the program
A Quebec high school diploma counts, even from an English school. Otherwise you pass the 3 hour exam, at no cost, of the Office québécois de la langue française (the Quebec French language office). Then the order issues your permit.
Hydro-Québec shut down Gentilly-2, Quebec's last nuclear power plant, on December 28, 2012, after 29 years. Its spent fuel has been in dry storage since 2020, and dismantling is planned for 2057 to 2062. In 2023 Hydro-Québec said it was assessing the plant's condition and would not rule out any energy source.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Safety analysis
Modelling what happens in an accident. Highly specialized and always in demand.
Radiation protection
Dose control, shielding and monitoring. A career of its own at every station.
Outage and refurbishment planning
Big projects, hard deadlines, long days.
Small modular reactor work
New designs mean new licensing, and licensing work needs engineers who can write.
A clean record
Security clearance is part of the job at every station.
Patience for procedure
Nothing gets done here without a written, approved procedure.
Simulation and coding skills
Python and thermal hydraulics codes show up constantly.
Willingness to live near a station
Most jobs are outside big cities, in places like Bowmanville, Tiverton and Saint John.
Reactors also make medical isotopes, so some nuclear engineers work in health technology instead of electricity. Others work at uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan, at waste management organizations planning long term storage, at the federal regulator reviewing other people's designs, or at research labs like Chalk River in Ontario. The core skills, radiation, heat transfer and safety cases, carry across all of it.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Badge in through security at 7. Morning meeting on what is running and what is broken. The rest of the morning reviewing a change to a cooling system, checking it against the safety case and writing it up. Afternoon in the plant with a maintenance crew, wearing dosimetry, or back at the desk answering a question from the control room. Home by 5, unless the station is in an outage, when 12 hour days run for weeks.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 2025 nuclear reactors at Bruce, Darlington and Pickering made 48.2% of the electricity on Ontario's grid, the IESO (Independent Electricity System Operator) reports. That is why most nuclear engineering jobs in the country are within a couple of hours of Toronto.
Hydro-Québec shut its Gentilly-2 reactor on December 28, 2012. Its dismantling is planned for 2057 to 2062, with monitoring of the restored site until 2074.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Engineers first, then the rest of the field. See every career in engineering.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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