NRCprep.com is a website designed to prepare people to enter the nuclear workforce.  I conceived of the idea for the website when I was leaving the Nuclear Navy and preparing to work in the commercial nuclear industry.

 

I knew that the first step to qualifying as an operator in commercial nuclear power was passing the NRC's Generic Fundamentals Exam.  Wanting to do well, I looked for information and material that might help me prepare for this challenge.  I found two resources that were indispensable, and completely free:  The DOE Fundamentals Handbooks (formerly known as Reactor Operator Fundamentals Manuals) and the NRC's Generic Fundamentals Exam (GFE) bank.

 

However, these two government-produced resources (which truly are made for each other) were not together anywhere on the web in an accessible, user-friendly form.  You could find the DOE Fundamentals Handbooks using a search engine, but they were truly needles in a haystack, hidden in vast data vaults of far less helpful information, with obscure filenames like h1013v2.pdf.

 

The NRC exam banks were better organized and more accessible, but I found that an interactive quiz could be a much more engaging study tool than pages of questions with the answer printed right below.  The Naval Nuclear Training Program makes use of interactive quizzes with good success.

 

So I set out to build a system that leveraged both of these under-valued resources to create a training platform that was modern, useful and even fun.  Using Google's App Engine, NRCprep.com hosts all of the relevant DOE Fundamentals Handbooks, making them accessible and searchable.  I also used TCExam, open source testing software by Nicola Asuni, to host interactive quizzes and exams, drawing from a database of well over a thousand past GFE questions.  The result, I hope, is the most convenient and modern nuclear training website available.