Nuclear Build Generation Gap Saps Global Project Skills

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--A lack of new nuclear construction projects and delays in proposed projects has led to a worldwide dissipation of the knowledge, skills, lessons and experience gained during the initial wave of nuclear power plant building, which is now some decades past. This was the message given to this week's Nuclear Energy Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, by Simon Marshall, Westinghouse's U.K. project director.

As nuclear experts start retiring without having passed on the critical skills needed for nuclear new build programs, the number of those with such skills is steadily fading.

"Most of the skills rest in people who are of a certain age, because we did not build new nuclear power stations for a long time," Marshall said. "We have not trained apprentices, and the nuclear engineering schemes at universities had stopped and have only just restarted." National programs are now required, he said.

The global nuclear industry needed to examine what skills had been retained and what skills had to be recruited for a successful nuclear power plant construction project, a maintenance program and the decommissioning at the end of the plant's life. Many of the skills and lessons learned during the first wave of the nuclear build in the 1970s would have to be relearned worldwide.

Looking at the prospects for South Africa's proposed 9,600-megawatt (MW) nuclear build and localization program, Marshall suggested that it could benefit from the experience of the Westinghouse extensive build localization program in China. That project currently involves building four Westinghouse-designed AP1000 third-generation reactors, with the localization program to be completed in 2015.

The South African government has been making an effort to retain nuclear skills and is due to make a final decision on the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor project this year.

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