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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University will begin offering graduate degrees in nuclear engineering and radiation health physics via distance education in fall 2003 to help address a national and international demand for more advanced education by working professionals in these fields.

OSU Extended Campus, which is OSU's award-winning program of distance education, will enable students to pursue a master's degree and/or a doctoral degree in both nuclear engineering and radiation health physics. Program details can be found on the web at ecampus.oregonstate.edu.

This is the first engineering graduate degree that OSU Extended Campus has offered, said dean Bill McCaughan. Very few other universities in the nation offer distance degrees in this field.

"Graduate level education increasingly is a necessity for people who want to advance in their careers in highly complex fields such as nuclear engineering," McCaughan said. "But many professionals don't want to quit their jobs to return to school in a conventional setting. It's clear that there is a significant demand for graduate programs in this and many other areas, and we see this as an area of potential growth for OSU's extended education offerings."

The wide range of technologies now available to conduct distance education - the Internet, e-mail, interactive video - make it more viable to create graduate degrees in highly technical fields of science and engineering, McCaughan said. OSU now is offering 150 courses in 30 subjects every term in both undergraduate and graduate fields, he said.

According to Andrew Klein, professor and head of the OSU Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, a wave of retirements in national laboratories and nuclear facilities around the world is causing a significant demand for more nuclear engineers with advanced degrees.

"Nuclear power continues to be an important source of electricity generation that does not emit greenhouse gases," Klein said. "With 20 percent of the power consumed in the U.S. today being generated by nuclear energy, it will be important well into the future."

Recent studies have shown that even without additions to the current operating fleet of 103 nuclear power plants in the U.S., there will be a tremendous need for highly educated nuclear professionals during the next decade, Klein said.

"It will be a seller's employment market for nuclear engineers and health physicists for many years to come," he said.

The OSU programs in nuclear engineering and radiation health physics are ranked in the top 15 in the nation. OSU has long played a role in education and research in nuclear areas, and the department operates a 1.1-megawatt TRIGA Mark II research reactor, as well as teaching laboratories in radiation health, nuclear chemistry and nuclear engineering.

There is no other university facility with these combined capabilities in the western United States, officials say.