Staffing the nuclear renaissance: An integrated modeling assessment of national workforce requirements for Canada’s 2050 nuclear expansion

Several of Canada's decarbonization pathways envision a significant nuclear buildout, and where that path is pursued, workforce availability becomes a binding constraint. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first transparent, top-down workforce model developed specifically for Canada's national nuclear program, a capacity-based, technology-agnostic framework that translates policy-consistent capacity pathways into annual labor demand across direct, indirect, and induced jobs, using per GWe intensities, attrition, and commissioning schedules. We compare Committed-Build, Policy-Accelerated, and COP-Aligned pathways to a reference case, yielding scenario-specific hiring profiles. Results show that national employment peaks are driven more by commissioning cadence and supply chain localization, with peak height invariant to build duration under uniform commissioning and fixed per-unit labor intensity, an arithmetic property of the model that we test directly in a construction-time scaling case. A central finding is that the skilled trades workforce in on-site construction drives peak-year hiring, underscoring the need to expand apprenticeships and mid-career bridging. We then map demand to education and training requirements, highlighting expanded engineering intake, higher apprenticeship throughput for trades, and mid-career bridging. Finally, we summarize policy options used in comparable programs, including coordinated project starts, credential portability, targeted immigration, domestic supply-chain development, and a modest post-2050 continuous-build baseline to sustain skills. The framework provides decision-makers with quantifiable hiring targets and timing, links them to practical pipeline interventions, and offers a reproducible basis for monitoring and adjustment as projects evolve.