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The NAYGN Impact: Advancing the Future of Nuclear

The following is a guest post from Natalie Wood, vice president coordinator at Entergy's River Bend Station. 
Natalie Wood
As I prepared to take on my role as the president of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best align the organization to help advance the future of nuclear. As the future leaders of this industry, we need to better utilize our voices as young professionals. In 2015, we reached 54,668 people sharing the benefits of nuclear energy. This is impressive, but how can we speak with one voice to make an even greater impact?

What if we changed how we think about NAYGN? Instead of thinking about what we are doing on a small scale, we think about what we are accomplishing as a way of helping the industry. This “what if” helped to drive the creation of a new initiative called The NAYGN Impact.

On May 23, The NAYGN Impact was introduced to the attendees at the NAYGN conference in Miami. This initiative was created to complement current industry efforts to improve efficiency while also advocating for nuclear energy facilities to be fully recognized for their value. This is not a change to the current NAYGN mission nor is it a request for chapters to increase the number of hours they volunteer. Instead, this is an opportunity for our organization to align its efforts with what will make the most impact within our companies and the nuclear industry.

The goals of The NAYGN Impact initiative are to (1) ensure the efforts of NAYGN are aligned to advance the future of the nuclear industry and (2) communicate the value that NAYGN provides. What makes this a simple idea is everything NAYGN does already aligns with being part of the solution. We are asking our local NAYGN chapters to decide what one thing they want to do this year to contribute to the success of the nuclear industry and to set a specific goal tied to this idea.

I challenge everyone to think about the actions they can take to advance the nuclear industry because, together, we can make an impact.

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