Construction is the challenge with nuclear. It's likely that due to the extreme challenge of construction, we will see a huge contraction in the amount of nuclear.
We literally can't build it fast enough anymore to replace reactors that are reaching their end of life.
Choosing a nuclear engineer career path today is likely to be extremely challenging, and will have little impact. Better to try something that scales, like wind/solar/storage, or do something high-risk that is completely out of the known path, in order to try to blaze something novel. (We still need cement and steel decarbonization tech, for example.)
Talking from my experience, despite its undeniable advantages to fight climate change, the general hostility of the public opinion towards fission (or nuclear in general) refrained me from pursuing this path...
As a software engineer, I am seriously considering going back to college and studying nuclear physics.
I believe an abundance of emission-free energy is about the only thing that can move the global economy to where it needs to be. Fossil fuels need to be out-competed with very cheap electricity. Once you achieve that, capitalism will ensure that all fossil fuel burning devices will gradually disappear. Other methods that try to fight capitalism (e.g. CO2 taxes) are ultimately losing battles, because the global political goodwill will never be there.
Solar is great, and cheap, until it's not. You need to cover vast areas of land in solar panels to power the whole country (incl. cars, freight, industry, ...), which is impractical and extremely costly, and still only works part of the day/year. It's an important part of the solution, but not the solution.
Nuclear is about the only thing that can provide continuous abundance at a reasonable cost, though we need new technologies.
There's Terrapower, which seems like a pretty interesting place to work and a lot of worthwhile technologies. I'd probably go work there myself if I were open to the location.
