Keep reactors running safely, and design the next ones. A small field with long, stable careers.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed engineer
$95,000
Engineer-in-training
$62,000
Senior or station specialist
$151,000
Job Bank's national median is $45.67 an hour, about $95,000 a year full time. Almost all of these jobs are in Ontario, with a smaller cluster in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. Station jobs usually pay more than consulting or regulator jobs.
$62,000 to $80,000
EIT (engineer-in-training) at a station or an engineering firm
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.
$150,000 and up
Senior design authorities, safety analysts, station engineering managers
Outage work, where a reactor is shut down for maintenance on a fixed schedule, brings long days and overtime for the engineers supporting it.
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
Nuclear utilities are among the last large employers with strong defined-benefit pensions.
Job stability
Stations run for decades and refurbishment projects last years.
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
About four years of supervised work, plus a lot of station specific training on reactor systems and radiation protection.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After about 4 years
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.
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, strong premiums.
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.
The CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) reactor is a Canadian design. It runs on natural uranium instead of enriched fuel and uses heavy water, and it can be refuelled while it is still generating power.
About half of Ontario's electricity comes from nuclear reactors at Bruce, Darlington and Pickering. That is why nearly every nuclear engineering job in the country is within a couple of hours of Toronto.
Canadian reactors produce cobalt-60, which is used around the world to sterilize medical equipment and to treat cancer. Some of that work happens inside operating power stations while they generate electricity.
Ontario Power Generation is building Canada's first grid scale small modular reactor at the Darlington site. It is a much smaller unit than a traditional station, and the licensing work alone has created years of engineering jobs.
Last checked September 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.