Post by Aleshia Duncan

Sometimes stakeholder engagement and mentoring extends past duty hours and looks like dinner with students and papanasi, my favorite Romanian dessert. This week, I had dinner in Bucharest with two of my favorite young women Raluca Sima and Alexia Mircea, whom I first met four years ago as impressive high school students participating in a #STEM mentoring initiative led by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. The following year, we brought a group of Romanian young women to Japan for another mentoring program, intentionally connecting them with their Japanese colleagues and taking them on a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Now they're both in university studying in the engineering program. Mentoring is a small piece of the legacy of Bill Magwood, who has been my mentor for decades and personally recruited me into the nuclear sector. My approach to mentoring has always been connected, layered, and curated for the long term. Relationships are built over years, not events. One introduction leads to another. One opportunity creates the next. As I reflect on Romania’s impressive progress toward completing Units 3 and 4, and the important role U.S. companies are playing, I am equally proud of the country’s commitment to developing the next generation of nuclear professionals. New reactors alone do not create a nuclear future. We must also invest in the people who will design them, operate them, regulate them, communicate about them, and lead them. For me, stakeholder engagement and mentoring has never been limited to meetings, agreements, or conferences. Sometimes it looks like dinner, laughter, catching up on life, and sharing papanasi. Because building the ecosystem that supports nuclear deployment begins, and endures, with relationships. 🇷🇴 Here’s to Romania’s nuclear future and to the young leaders who will help make it possible. #StakeholderEngagement #Mentorship #Romania #NuclearEnergy #STEM #Leadership #WorkforceDevelopment #NextGeneration #TheDisruptor