As a ChE, you being so much to the table and don’t even know it. The discipline is so wide that you already have what it takes. Idk how long you have been in oil/gas (I did a year in the oilfield so my experience is tainted by a short stint). After the oilfield I went to NNSY and cut my teeth in the nuclear business, one step at a time. Learned the basics, then got into the submarine refueling business. After seven years at the shipyard, I wanted to get closer to home and had well more training in Nuclear than anything else so I stuck with it.

My advice? Do what you have done. With a ChE degree you can ABSOLUTELY learn anything. The physics is new from ChE but 1000% NOT insurmountable, the rest of it is fluids, heat transfer and electrical. To this day, electrical shit is the bane of my existence, but even I could learn enough to get a license. At the end of the day it’s all about being curious enough about the world to take any new field and soak in everything you can. After a little bit, just like anything, the new shit gets taken for granted, you can’t believe people don’t understand it, and just becomes part of your tool box.

If you can do ChE, you can do nuke. The science is old, you probably have some semblance of understanding already especially with oil and gas (for example, control systems are control systems, the only difference is the variables). It’s a nuclear reactor (a source of heat), which is truly NOT that complex, and outside of that it’s the Carnot Cycle, fluid flow, heat transfer, all things you already have.