Supply Chain

This week we speak to a round table of professionals at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on skills and training requisites for those looking to move into the nuclear energy sector for the first time. Readers of the Nuclear Energy Insider interested in attending the Institution’s nuclear career transition course can send a second delegate for free by quoting this article and contacting the Director of Training and Development at training@imeche.org by 4pm on Tuesday 20th July.

Interview by Katherine Steiner-Dicks

Nuclear Energy Insider: Given the relative re-birth of the nuclear energy sector across the globe, can you give us an indication of which career opportunities are becoming available for seasoned executives that are considering a business sector change into nuclear and how the Institution is gearing up for this?

Chiara Rustici, Director of Training and Development, IMechE:

All professional profiles along each and every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle are affected by a skills gap.

Job demand depends on where a nuclear programme or a country is along the nuclear fuel cycle.

Let’s look at this in detail by breaking down the nuclear fuel cycle into ten stages:

(1) siting; (2) designing; (3) constructing; (4) operating; (5) spent fuel management; (6) radioactive waste disposal; (7) decommissioning (8) site redevelopment; (9) transportation; (10) emergency planning.

If you consider the so called front end, at the nuclear site or reactor siting stage, you need environmental experts; geologists; hydro geologists as well as civil engineers.

At the reactor design stage, as well as a core group of civil and mechanical engineers you need architects; hydraulic engineers; geo-technicians; electrical and electronic engineers; database managers; reactor engineers; nuclear chemists and conventional chemists; nuclear physicists.

When you finally reach the construction stage, the requirements for hydraulic engineers, civil engineers, nuclear physicists and reactor engineers surpasses any other category.

When the site is operational, you will see headhunting for nuclear site director positions and an increased demand yet again for nuclear engineers; reactor engineers; nuclear and conventional chemists; nuclear physicists.

If you consider the spent fuel management, radioactive waste disposal and decommissioning stages – the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle - we will still see most of the roles relevant at the front end in great demand.

However, in decommissioning, we will see environmental remediation experts and robotics engineers required as well.

Lastly, at the redevelopment stage in redesigning the uses of a former nuclear site, you will need environmental planning experts and also social scientist, to help you examine the redeployment of the workforce.

Additionally, there are professional profiles that are relevant throughout the nuclear fuel chain: the stakeholder manager, the safety assessor manager and the radiation protection specialist are always needed to ensure that normative requirements are met and the public is kept actively engaged in every nuclear decision at every stage of the cycle.

On the one hand, we have launched a short, intensive career transition training course focusing on specific job profiles such as Successful Nuclear Stakeholder Engagement.

The philosophy behind the career transition courses is to capture that most precious, and elusive, form of professional know-how: lessons learned the hard way, on the job, when you have skin in the game.

When we approach world experts and ask them to train for us, what we prize above of all is how successfully they managed to implement hard decisions when confronted with difficult choices throughout their career.

These courses help engineers capitalise on the know-how, experience, credibility and gravitas acquired in previous roles from other industries and turn it into an asset when moving into the nuclear job market.

When this experience is coupled with job profile-specific nuclear expertise, passed on by our trainers, engineers can perform at peak level in a senior nuclear role contributing far more than a recent graduate could.  

Nuclear Energy Insider: Is the Institution partnering with other industry bodies?

Karen Bayless, Senior Manager, Membership and Professional Development, IMechE: We are currently working with partners – other professional bodies and businesses – to create a new professional register for engineers specialising in decommissioning activities.   

This would result in a new Decommissioning Chartered Engineer, a registration identified by the post-nominals DeComE.

It has been recognised that there is a pressing and long-term need for decommissioning skills in the nuclear sector specifically, but more widely across a number of sectors.

Research suggests that engineering skills needs are changing dramatically from commissioning and running operations to close-down and decommissioning. 

Increasingly, companies are requiring engineers to show that they have a very specific set of skills – as an individual – when the contract is awarded on a named basis only.

This will provide exciting opportunities for younger engineers as decommissioning projects span 15-20 years – the best part of a qualified engineer’s working career.  

Specialism in this field will remain in high demand. A pilot group has been run and work continues to set and agree the framework and specific processes with the partners and EC. 

Nuclear Energy Insider: What would you say to those considering the sector career change as a training 'must'?

Chiara Rustici, Director of Training and Development, IMechE:

In the first instance, I would encourage them to steel themselves for an unpredictable recruiting pattern.

My advice is to invest in their training as soon as they have decided that this is what they are passionate about and is the sector they want to be in, and then be equally ready to take up their new role either straight away or in 4 or 5 years’ time.

You cannot time the nuclear job market by months: you have to measure it in years. Nuclear energy is a long-term investment industry, but investment is not consistent throughout.

While nuclear issues don’t simply disappear, and require attention and skilled personnel for decades – think of radioactive waste - the recruitment pattern for qualified engineers ebbs and flows with the changes in a country’s energy policies.

Just to use the UK as an example, only a year ago the HR departments of major nuclear employers would struggle to fill vacancies, experiencing an acute dearth of qualified nuclear engineers.

Suddenly, given the uncertain political position on the nuclear choices facing the UK, those same HR departments have a recruitment freeze in place until the end of the year.

They know, however, that when they’ll come back to the market to secure top personnel, a lack of qualified engineers is likely to haunt them again.

As a second piece of advice, I would urge them to be prepared to relocate or travel to secure their first role in this career transition.

There are two reasons behind this: nuclear sector engineering know-how is equally applicable in Europe as it is in Asia and best practice and safety standards are international.

Although each country is setting up national training recognition schemes or “skills passports”, the truth is that no country can ignore international best practice.

The most precious piece of advice in a time of crisis may well come to you from a call to a Japanese colleague you met at an international conference or training course six years ago.

The other reason why an international outlook and mobility is advisable is that the sector is particularly stakeholder-intensive and reliant on a country’s public and political mood.

While new build may stall for a period in a given European state, other Asian countries are looking for qualified engineers on their many ongoing projects. There are 13 new nuclear power plants under construction in Europe, 3 in North America and 33 in Asia.

A good case study of this internationalisation of nuclear skills is Amec. Amec is part of the Tier 1 consortium running the Sellafield decommissioning programme.

However, they also operate as a Tier 2 supplier, delivering waste characterisation, minimisation and processing, transportation and safe disposal of hazardous material across the globe.

Amec has operations in Canada, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Russia, and is responsible for the world’s largest decommissioning contract in Ignalina, Lithuania.

So, even if, for the sake of argument, there were a recruitment freeze at Sellafield, engineers interested in transitioning to the nuclear sector may still want to select an appropriate training course, send their CV to an employer like Amec and make sure they have renewed their passport. 

Nuclear Energy Insider: Can you tell our readers a bit about your mentoring programme and how it works?

Jane Noakes, Senior Executive, Professional Development, IMechE:

The Institution offers graduate engineers the opportunity to follow a structured mentoring programme in order to achieve professional registration.

Those companies who have an accredited training and development strategy are invited to register their Professionally Registered engineers as mentors. 

These mentors are then matched with graduate engineers who work together over a 4 year period as they progress towards the standard industry competences (EC UK-SPEC).

There is an online recording system, eMPDS, that allows mentees to plan, evidence, report and review their progress and an end of year assessment pro forma that allows the mentor to benchmark for the following year.

We have found that mentoring for professional registration is popular with senior engineers as it contributes towards their Continuing Professional Development and allows them to share their skills, knowledge and experience in a structured format. 

We currently have 5000 mentors registered with the IMechE. 

Nuclear Energy Insider: There is talk of cross-sector manufacturing within renewables, (i.e., potentially using auto manufacturing techniques in solar module manufacturing). Do you see this occurring in the nuclear sector? If so, can you lend us an example and how it can be a shared benefit in the current economic climate?

Ben Sampson, Assistant Editor, Professional Engineering:

It is certainly true that overall engineering sectors are increasingly willing to learn from approaches and techniques in other sectors and that this is on the increase generally.

However, manufacturing companies simply “crossing-over” products and technology into the nuclear sector is unlikely for two reasons. A lot of components and products used in the nuclear industry use expensive and bespoke materials, and will not be mass manufactured in the way, for example, that cars are.

Secondly, the accreditation procedure to manufacture for the sector, and the standards it demands, are extremely stringent.

This makes it expensive and challenging for most companies to supply to the nuclear sector, so for most it will be a strategic decision which will involve investment.

A good example of this is the recent controversy about the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters for the plant to make pressure vessels.

That’s not to say there aren’t opportunities for large engineering companies and SMEs.

The big electricity companies such as RWE and E.On are holding events to encourage local firms’ involvement in their projects, but these will be civil engineering and construction firms and companies already supplying electrical equipment to the energy industry. 

Nuclear Energy Insider: Despite the fact that the quality assurance required for nuclear components manufacturing is such that it is difficult to transfer from other industries, are there ways to make the transition easier?

Corhyn Parr of Nuclear Enterprise Ltd and Chair of the IMechE Nuclear Power Committee: Techniques, such as modularisation, are used extensively across the industry in the design, manufacturing and construction of facilities and large plant items to increase quality and safety by reducing site working and providing opportunities for additional testing off site.  

The most recent and successful example of this is for the design, manufacture and commissioning of the Evaporator D facility at Sellafield.  

There are currently three evaporators that make up Sellafield’s highly active liquor evaporative capacity.

Evaporator D will expand Sellafield’s ability to process nuclear waste material and ultimately reduce inventories at the site, as part of the NDA’s decommissioning strategy.

When operational, Evaporator D will be used to evaporate High Active (HA) raffinate produced during reprocessing and to process effluent from the Waste Vitrification Plant (WVP).

Once concentrated through evaporation, the raffinate is called Highly Active Liquor (HAL).

HAL is stored in the Highly Active Liquor Encapsulation and Storage facility prior to feeding to the WVP for vitrification, which immobilises the waste for long-term storage and eventual disposal.

 Project Description

 •        Evaporator D will be a very large evaporator structure, sited at the Sellafield site in Cumbria

•        The housed building will consist of 15 in-cell modules, the largest of which will be 27m high

•        Over 21 kilometres of pipework, bound together by over 10,000 welds

•        300 tonnes of specialist steel used to make the key highly active equipment

•        396 major plant items

•        Modules will be transported by sea, and moved onto Sellafield site across the River Ehen and the Barrow to Workington rail lines. 

Benefits of Modularisation

•        Quality of fabrication that can be achieved in a bespoke, clean workshop has been proven particularly when repeatability is required.

•        Reduced downtime due to adverse weather

•        Reduced site working

•        Reduced downtime due to difficult site conditions

•        Reduced site labour required

•        Reduced overall implementation schedule.  This is achieved by executing off-site and on-site activities in parallel, which, are often undertaken sequentially in a traditional build project.

•        Reduced potential for site based accidents and incidents

•        Greater cost efficiencies than traditional build methods. 

•        Increased level of systemisation and commissioning testing that can be achieved during off-site fabrication that would not be readily available on-site due to space and time constraints.   

Nuclear Energy Insider: If there's a message you would like to get out there or something you'd like to get off your chest, what would it be? 

Chiara Rustici, Director of Training and Development, IMechE:

Readers of the Nuclear Energy Insider interested in attending the Institution’scareer transition course can send a second delegate for free by quoting this article and contacting the Director of Training and Development at training@imeche.org by Tuesday, 20 July by 4pm.