Engineering: turning ideas into reality - Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee Contents


Memorandum 91

Submission from Professor R G Faulkner, Loughborough University

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

UK ENGINEERING CAPACITY FOR NEW BUILD

  1.  The Government's sale of BNFL was an untimely and, in view of recent events, disastrous move from the viewpoint of engineer skill provision for nuclear new build. The nuclear engineer skill base has been reducing by approximately 10% per annum for the past 15 years. There are precious few nuclear engineers with deep experience left in the UK workplace. Many of those who could have helped are either retired or have globalised and gone to work for EDF, Siemens, and Areva in Europe or the Far East. There are small pockets of capability in British Energy, British Nuclear Group, and Nexia Solutions. The latter group have developed good skills in fuel reprocessing and de-commissioning. A few ageing academics and consultants from the good days with Nuclear Electric, BNFL Magnox are still available to help build the knowledge base for the next generation.

VALUE OF TRAINING A NEW GENERATION OF NUCLEAR ENGINEERS

  2.  The skills base in nuclear engineering is still just above the critical nucleus size to allow training of the UK nuclear engineer skills required for the future. The scale of the difficulty lies in the spread-out nature of existing training facilities. There are some reactor and training facilities at Imperial College. BNFL, before its demise, set pu the Dalton Centre in Manchester, but this urgently needs re-direction since it has lost its focus since the withdrawal of support from BNFL. There are areas of good physics and materials nuclear engineering experience in the Universities at Loughborough, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, and Oxford.

  3.  We are competing against much greater forces in the US. Currently there are 21 Nuclear Engineering programmes operating in the States. My recommendation is that we get on with it and re-build our University skills base to match the American model as soon as possible.

  4.  It would be very sad if we abandoned the skills that we still possess in the UK from a training viewpoint, and relied on foreign input. Many of us have built good relationships with nuclear engineers in the USA and France in recent years, and this networking will now begin to pay off if UK based training courses were re-introduced.

ROLE OF ENGINEERS IN SHAPING UK'S NUCLEAR FUTURE

  5.  It is important to stress that development of environmentally and economically viable nuclear plant in the UK depends entirely on the skills of engineers. This is one area where having a good business degree will not be an advantage. There are many new technological developments that have to be harnessed by engineers with respect to making nuclear cleaner and cheaper. The Generation IV systems, including high temperature reactors, pebble-bed reactors, AP1000 designs (based on the current PWR at Sizewell "B"), are all requiring more research, development and construction. The goal is worthwhile because all of these designs will improve fuel efficiency and reduced resource and operating costs. The long term solution to electrical energy supply with no resource problem, that of Fusion, is already well-underway with excellent teams of UK engineers in place at UKAEA, Culham and at the ITER site in Cadarache, France.

  6.  There is no question that the new generation of UK nuclear engineers will be trained to work in the global market: it simply remains for us to create sufficient numbers of these people to maintain the UK's still-leading role in the global nuclear marketplace.

CIVIL/MILITARY CONFLICTS

  7.  In my 40 years of experience of nuclear engineering, there has always been a very large gap kept between the engineering activities in the civil arena and those at Aldermaston. Certainly, there are many potential student nuclear engineers who would be discouraged to enter the Industry if they thought their work was likely to be of military significance.

March 2008





 
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