Oscar Limpias is engineering VP at Entergy Nuclear

He sees a bright future for careers in nuclear engineering: “It’s an exciting time to be part of the nuclear field; engineers are needed in all disciplines”

Entergy’s Oscar Limpias: “Nuclear power is safe, clean and reliable. There’s a lot of focus on building new nuclear plants.”

'The power of people” is more than a slogan at Entergy. It’s the core of Oscar Limpias’ management approach.

Since 2007, Limpias has been VP for engineering at Entergy Nuclear Operations (Jackson, MS), a division of Entergy Corp (New Orleans, LA). He oversees some 1,000 engineers working at ten sites and, back at corporate headquarters, five top-tier managers.

Entergy is the second-largest nuclear power producer in the U.S. It operates twelve nuclear reactors at sites in Arkansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York and Vermont.

An approachable style
Limpias, who escaped political instability in his native Bolivia by coming to the U.S., believes in managing people with sincerity. He characterizes himself as “very, very approachable.” He’s a demanding manager, but one who “likes people to be comfortable around me.

“Another thing I like is that you learn from everyone,” he says. “Everyone has something to offer, so managing people is like constant learning.” The different personalities he works with are an interesting aspect of managing, he notes.

Management and engineering
Limpias’ day starts early, with conference calls to the sites to find out what occurred during the night. Then he reviews stacks of paperwork: technical documents, engineering requests and, recently, approvals for new hires. After another round of plant calls, he spends the next few hours reviewing assignments for his staff.

Although staying in touch with the plants is always his top focus, active hiring at the company means he often interviews new candidates as well.

Even as a VP, Limpias stays involved in the engineering he loves. Starting as a civil engineer, he’s expanded his know-how to electrical, mechanical and nuclear engineering. He was trained at Peach Bottom Atomic Station in Pennsylvania and holds a certificate in power plant operations from that facility.

“I still sit with the engineers and together we work out resolutions to issues. The problem in my job is, if I let engineering go and just manage personnel issues, then the technical knowledge will disappear,” he reflects. “I won’t let that happen!”

The workforce challenge
Staffing is one of Limpias’ major concerns. “The nuclear utility industry faces the same staffing challenges as the American workforce at large,” he explains. “In the next five years, we’ll lose significant percentages of technical and other employees to attrition and retirement. At the same time, the demand for power is growing fast and billions of dollars may soon be invested in new plant construction. The big challenge will be locating nuclear, civil and other engineers to replace retiring employees.”

Last year Entergy had 140 vacancies and Limpias traveled to Arkansas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, Tennessee and Puerto Rico to fill them.

Starting out
Limpias has a BA in humanities from Colégio La Salle in Bolivia, which he earned concurrently with his Bolivian high school diploma. He attended the University of Architecture in San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina, but there was unrest in Argentina, and the government closed the universities. “Nobody knew when they would reopen,” Limpias remembers.

In the end, Limpias followed his brother to California, earning his 1979 BSCE at California State University, Chico. Looking back, he doesn’t think he would have “gotten as far with architecture as I have with a civil engineering degree.”

When he first came to the U.S. Limpias worked in a Mexican restaurant in Berkeley, CA. He studied English all the time, reading menus, going to night school and watching TV. His college roommates were from Africa and China. “We had to get good at speaking English to understand each other,” he says with a smile.

First job: Bechtel
As he was about to graduate, Limpias saw an ad from a Bechtel company looking for CEs. The interviewer told him he didn’t qualify because he didn’t have enough structural steel work, but Limpias persisted.

“I said, ‘Listen, I will go back to school and study structural steel and come back in two weeks and you test me on anything you want.’” He didn’t know the boss was standing behind him. The boss said, “We’d better hire this guy, he has the attitude we need,” and they did.

He worked for Bechtel from 1980 to 1989, when computers were just entering the engineering workplace. Bechtel sent Limpias to training seminars and seven months later he was teaching computerized structural analysis to engineers building the Limerick, PA nuclear plant.

The Pennsylvania days
After two years in the San Francisco office, he was transferred to Pennsylvania to finish construction of the Limerick Generating Station. After a year at Limerick, he and his wife decided they liked Pennsylvania, and Limpias found a job with Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO) in Philadelphia.

He spent the next six years as a manager in the civil engineering branch of Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station. In 1996 he and six other members of the PECO organization were tapped to help in the recovery of Millstone Unit 1 in Connecticut. Limpias was senior manager of design engineering on the project. He went on to manage the modifications group at Millstone Unit 3. When that assignment was finished, he returned to Peach Bottom as the senior manager of plant engineering. Peach Bottom is co-owned by Exelon Generation (Chicago, IL) and PSE&G (Newark, NJ).

Between 1998 and 2001 Limpias was the engineering transition lead, and later director of site engineering, at Exelon’s Three Mile Island Nuclear Station near Harrisburg, PA. “I had close to a hundred engineers under me, and we supported day-to-day operations,” he explains.

A nuclear leader
Limpias joined Entergy in 2001 as director of site engineering at James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant near Oswego, NY. “That went so well that I got promoted,” he says with a chuckle.

In 2004 he became VP of engineering, working at Entergy’s Northeast HQ (White Plains, NY) and overseeing engineering activities for Entergy’s emerging nuclear business in the Northeast. Then he moved to Jackson, MS, and his current job managing engineering for the entire nuclear operation of Entergy.

“The opportunities have been great for me with this company, challenging and personally fulfilling at the same time,” he says.

The future is bright
Limpias thinks the outlook is bright for engineering careers in the nuclear industry. “Nuclear power is safe, clean and reliable,” he notes.

“Right now there’s a lot of focus on building new nuclear plants. Big companies like General Electric and Westinghouse are loading their organizations to be ready for the design and building of plants. If we get the needed loan-guarantee support from the government, the industry will be building new sites in coming years.”

Limpias’ individual future looks bright too. “Early in my career, I was always volunteering my knowledge to help someone,” he reflects. “If I didn’t know the answer, I would find somebody who did. When you do that, you become a person that other people depend on.”

The moral, he says, is “Don’t sit at your desk waiting for things to come to you.”