Nuke FY Quota
 

My son has all waivers approved for Nuke and has gone to MEPS for a physical only and passed. However, he is being told that his region Jacksonville/Orlando has completely met their fiscal year quota for Nuke and have no more slots available. He has been told he will have to wait until October for the new fiscal year to open up slots for Nuke, at which time he will go back to MEPS for the contract, and potentially return to MEPS in the Feb - Apr 2015 time frame to ship out for basic.

It seems like a very long wait for a field that I thought was in great demand. Anyone else having similar experiences?

Thanks.

Hi! I'm not sure how everything works, but I do know of two people in my DEP group who are going Nuke - and they picked "filler" jobs at MEPS when they went, and will be pushed out of them and into the Nuke position as soon as the slots open. We are in southern Georgia and serviced by the Jacksonville MEPS as well. I assume that is what your son would do as well, it is an in-demand field - but I am *pretty* sure it is phenomenal for recruiters to recruit nukes, so they are filling it pretty steadily. I don't think he will run into any problems getting the Nuke program as soon as it opens up, and the April-Feb timeline for basic is pretty standard even for non-nukes it seems.

He should not take a "filler" job he wouldn't be willing to do for 4+ years.

Hi again! I totally agree with Guppy that your son shouldn't just take some random "Filler" job, at least pick out something he could see himself doing instead of Nuke. I talked to the chief today at my recruiting station and he said that they have reached their FY quota for nukes, basically, there are still technically spots open, but they are reserving those spots for recruiting districts that haven't brought in many Nukes. At the beginning of October though, if your son is qualified to go Nuke and has a recruiter who actually cares and is pro-active, then he should have no problem getting one of the new Nuke spots that opens up then if he goes ahead and picks a job now. NOTHING is ever a guarantee, but that is the plan for our DEP Nukes. The reason for the filler job is that the Nuke spots fill up very fast, and if your sons name is already in the pool at MEPS then it will be easier for them to switch him over to Nuke in October, rather than risking him getting back down there to MEPS and having all of the Nuke slots filled again for the month. We are in the same region, as well. Hope that this information helps you out!

Hey I am currently at NNPTC and when I DEPed in I had to choose a job other than Nuke for the same reason, when October rolled around I had to go into the office and call MEPs and verbally change my contract over the phone.

My son initially signed up AECF, right about 2 years ago. He would have been OK with that, but he was aiming for NF, so they put in a DAR for NF and the one waiver he needed. After the waiver came through, he got a new Nuke contract. It might have been after the FY end. The process did move his ship date out 5 months, so he was in DEP a couple weeks short of a year.

Nuke quotas are essentially driven by the ability of the pipeline to put students through. In recent years, at least one of the prototypes have been down for one reason or another and not able to train students. This causes a backup in the training pipeline and it goes all the way to the Recruiting Command, driving down the number of slots that they have available. When I was an instructor at NPS, we routinely had upwards of 600 (effectively 2 entire NPS classes) people in our hold pool waiting to go to Prototype. With MARF being slated for decommissioning in the near future and the SC Prototype retiring the old MTS's and transitioning to the 688 Class MTS's, I would expect the backlog to continue for quite some time. If all of the Prototype plants are ever up and running at once and training students, Recruiters will not be able to keep their available Nuke billets filled.