I'm getting out of the Navy in January and I'm looking at working at ORNL or a couple different nuclear plants in NC/SC. Any recommendations on where to look for a place to live would be greatly appreciated my current plan is to rent a 2 bed apt for a bit while I get a feel for the area and then buy a 3 bed 2 bath house with some land.

If you're looking into Wilmington apartments, it would be best to keep it around monkey junction. It's a quieter and safer side of town. Not that Wilmington is dangerous or anything, but every town has "that side of town." or if you can afford it you could look into mayfaire or wrightsville beach.

Monkey Junction is good but you'll either have to take the ferry or drive up into town and then back down to Southport to get to the plant. I'd suggest Leland first just to shorten the commute.

Anywhere near Wrightsville Beach is good. The Bradley Creek area is also very nice. These areas have some apartments, but they can be pricey. If you want something cheaper, but still nice, look off of Racine and New Centre.
As a general rule of thumb, the best areas are east of Market Street. Hope this helped, and welcome to Wilmington!

Not really a lot of apartments around Southport and they would tend to be pricey.  A friend of mine just rented a 2 bedroom house with fenced in yard on Oak Island for 750 a month.  You might want to look there.  A lot of the people that work at The nuclear plant in Southport live on Oak Island.  Spouthport/Oak Island doesn't have all the excitement of Wilmington but it is nice and quiet.


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I live a 1/4 mile from the plant entrance. Rentals pop up but they don't last long. Keep an eye on Boiling Spring Lakes if ya don't mind being out that far. We've been renting out rooms in the house next to us and it stayed full when we wanted it. Coulda rented it out 5x a day if I wanted to rent the whole property. I lived in an RV the first year or so I was down here.
Ya don't wanna commute from ILM. Ferry and traffic hassles will drive you to drink. But then again, Southport IS the "Drinking town with a fishing problem". Hehehe.
IM or email if ya want some local help.    d:^)  Jake..

Leland looks promising.  I commuted across the water when I was stationed in Norfolk and REALLY don't want to do that again unless I have to.

Leland's ok. Kindof in the middle of everything and growing fast best I can tell. It's the bottleneck for Brunswick county.
So commuter traffic is a pain as well as ILM's oft bad timing for bridge openings. That's why we're selling out here and headed to the Burgaw area. Kris is a nurse at the VA out by the airport and she never knows if her commute is gonna be 45 mins or an hour and 45 mins. And I want more "huntable" property. So we're trying to take bridges and bottlenecks out of the equation.
If ya have designs on the nuke plant, it'd be a 30ish minute commute down 133 or 87 if traffic cooperated. Then there's Sunny Point if ya wanna stay on .gov's payroll.
Southport's nice if ya like to take it slow and don't mind trippin over the tourists during the "season".

If your young and like to go out and drink or shop skip Oak Island and Southport. I live in Leland.  The wife commutes to Wilmington and I commute to Southport.

I don't really care for going bar hopping anymore just kind off want to sit back and chill.  Oh and not live so close to another house that I can piss on the neighbors wall with my back to mine.




I ultimately want at least 10 acres that I can hunt and shoot on.

Look into Winnabow and Delco for land. Southport and Oak Island for kicking back and doing nothing.

You'll hafta stay more inland for that kindof acreage at an affordable price. The place is growing fast and real estate prices reflect that. We've got 4.25 acres just outside of SPT and that's considered a big property. I can shoot on it, but wouldn't feel comfortable with a range here.
Agreed with 00 that out t'wards Winnabow, Bolivia and such would be where you'd most likely find what you're looking for.    d:^)  Jake..

I'm assuming you're a nuke based on your post.  Duke Energy owns most of the nuclear plants in NC/SC.  You may want to look into getting a job with them.  ORNL is a nice area, and the Oconee nuclear station is in a similar region.  McGuire and Catawba are near Charlotte which is a nice bigger city.  Harris is near Raleigh which is also not a bad area, and of course Southport is a hidden gem if you can get on at Brunswick.  GE manufactures nuclear fuel and is located in Wilmington.  So you may have options....

Sorry I didn't directly answer your question.

Oconee or Catawba would be preferred but I haven't seen any aux operator positions posted for them and the guys I know working for Duke haven'tseen anything posted for them on the internal boards.

Have you checked with DZ Atlantic (Zimmerman)?
They seem to always be hiring. But they change personnel like it's a bodily function.  d:^)  Jake..

What about Shearon Harris?  You could find some good land in the area.

That sounds like a shit company.  Why set yourself up for failure, or misery, knowing that?

Every nuke plant outage contractor that I've heard about does that. I have a coupla friends in the hiring hierarchy of DZ. I think it's "nature of the beast" for outage contractors. Then there's a steady group of folks who like the moving every few months lifestyle of the outage workers.
They seem to do pretty well for themselves at their pay rates with somethin like $85 a day per diem.  d:^)  Jake..

Not really interested in being an outage contractor.

That is way different than working at a plant.  I was an outage contractor and I will tell you that $85 a day per diem isn't crap.  I was making $130 a day per diem, and at most plant locations, $65 to $95 of that automatically went right back out for hotel room.  At some places, the hotels filled up quick and you were stuck paying even more than that, or you were driving more than an hour to get to and from work.  That isn't fun when you are on 10 or 12 hour shifts.  Yeah, you could pile up two or three to a room and keep a bit more of that money, but there goes your privacy and most of the time, you have to tiptoe around everyone else because everyone winds up on different shifts so you don't want to disturb anyone while they are sleeping.

Also, the contractors are not making anywhere the near the money they used to.  In addition to many companies slashing pay rates because of the economy, outages used to last two to four months, sometimes longer.  Now, most companies are going to 17 to 25 day outages and they all shut down in just about the same time frame, so your opportunity to go from one outage to another is greatly diminished.  I worked outages from 2010 to 2013.  Once my contract was up, I dropped that shit like a hot potato because the shitty pay was not worth the shitty work, the travelling, and being away from home.  Almost everyone I went through training and worked with has moved on from that work, or is trying to.  It got so bad with the company losing people, even some of the home base office personnel had to undergo outage training so they could travel to the plants and fill work slots.

What are you doing now?

I went back to school when I left that job and have just started applying for some jobs, to include operator positions.