Aug. 25--ROLLA, Mo. -- On a July afternoon when many teenagers are savoring the final weeks of summer by the pool or at the mall, Erica Bay of Mexico, Mo., was busy explaining the workings of a pressurized water reactor and calculating neutron multiplication factors.

Bay, 17, was among 25 high school juniors and seniors who spent a week at Missouri University of Science & Technology's nuclear engineering camp -- a Nuclear 101 crash course for prospective students.

The camp, the only of its kind in the nation, began in 2000 as a recruiting tool. At the time, nuclear engineering enrollment at Missouri S&T was dwindling and administrators were desperate for new ways to interest students in what was viewed by some as an outmoded technology.

Today, nuclear engineering programs aren't worried about empty classrooms. The nuclear power sector is in the early stages of a revival. Utilities and vendors are hungry for more workers. Salaries are rising. And some schools that once couldn't find enough students now have too many.

Missouri S&T (formerly Missouri-Rolla) will enroll 168 nuclear engineering students -- three times as many as a few years ago -- when classes start today. And interest in the camp has swelled to the point that the school charges $500 to attend. Until this year, it was free, except for a $50 application fee.

"We're not struggling to find students anymore. We're looking to find good students," said Arvind S. Kumar, chairman of the school's nuclear engineering department. Enrollment "has been increasing ever since 2000, to the point that we're bursting at the seams."

It's the same story at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where the nuclear engineering graduate program capped enrollment at 65 to keep class sizes manageable.

"We're saturated," said Mark A. Prelas, a professor and director of research at Mizzou's Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute. "We just don't have the faculty resources to handle any more."

AGING WORK FORCE

The urgency to find more engineers and technicians can be defined by a single number: 48 -- the average age of a U.S. nuclear worker.

Last fall, Carol Berrigan, an official for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade association, told a congressional committee that 19,600 current nuclear utility employees -- more than one-third of the total -- will be eligible to retire by 2012, and the industry also could lose 6,300 more workers to attrition during that period.

"Plants aren't shutting down for a lack of qualified people," said Charles Goodnight, a management consultant in Vienna, Va., who specializes in staffing at nuclear plants. "But there are large numbers of people who will retire in the next three to five years. It's already starting to happen, and it's happening worldwide."

AmerenUE has ramped up recruiting efforts for engineers and technicians to staff the Callaway plant outside Fulton, Mo., said Bill Jessop, manager of business operations at the plant.