As the global race to decarbonise the power sector grows, demand for skilled nuclear workers is growing

Last month, U.S. nuclear reactor supplier Westinghouse opened a 13,000-square-foot engineering office in Kitchener, Ont. The company plans to sell its products, including its flagship AP1000 reactor, in Canada while also serving international customers.

Having hired most of its 250 Canadian workers in the past three years, the company is now looking to hire 100 more engineers, a move that comes as skilled nuclear workers are in high demand after decades of slack.

China and Russia have long dominated construction, while Western nations have stagnated; Canada’s most recent power reactor was completed in the early 1990s. But efforts to decarbonize the power sector have coalesced in support for designing and building new reactors, even as aging facilities are being renovated — leading to a proliferation of announced nuclear projects.

Whether the nuclear industry, both at home and abroad, has enough talented engineers to carry out all these projects is a subject of heated debate.

The industry directly employs 33,000 people, according to a study five years ago by the Canadian Nuclear Association, up from 30,000 in 2012. Big employers include Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power, which operate large nuclear plants, and uranium mining giant Cameco Corp. CCO-T and Canadian National Laboratories, which operate the Chalk River research facility.

The survey is currently being updated, and while the results are not yet finalized, hiring appears to have increased by another 10 to 15 percent over the past five years. However, the sheer number of projects announced indicates faster growth.

OPG recently began early work on refurbishing four reactors at its Pickering station. The eight-reactor Bruce station, already one of the largest in the world, is in the early stages of a planned expansion that could add four new large reactors.

AtkinsRéalis, which runs the indigenous Canadian technology Candu, is racing against time to develop a modernized 1,000-megawatt reactor it calls Monark. It is one of the most active employers on Nuclear Jobs Canada, a job board for the industry.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is hiring at its Chalk River facility, a World War II-era facility that has been extensively modernized in recent years, to staff new labs and replace retiring workers.

“The nuclear industry was a little quiet for a while, but now it’s coming back,” said Janet Tosh, vice president of human resources at CNL.

“So we need to build this talent pipeline. But we’re not just looking for people in science and technology. We’re looking for technicians, machinists, certified tradespeople.”

And then there are relative newcomers in Canada, such as Westinghouse. Another American reactor supplier, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, has partnered with OPG to build up to four small modular reactors at Darlington Station.

The picture is similar in other Western countries, including the US and UK, where reactor construction has been restricted for decades. There are numerous reports that nuclear employers, desperate for talent, are luring long-retired professionals back into the workforce.

Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering published a 250-page report examining potential barriers to major expansion of new “advanced” reactors. It cited labor availability as a key constraint.

“Utilities generally have not hired adequately skilled personnel to undertake these large projects, given the limited use of nuclear technology in the United States over the past 30 years,” the report said.

“This talent shortage could become equally constraining across the supply chain, operations and regulatory organizations that must support any large increase in nuclear deployment.”

Akira Tokuhiro, a professor at Ontario Tech University, home to one of the largest nuclear engineering programs in North America, noted that large nuclear employers have pledged to hire hundreds of workers on LinkedIn.

“And I thought, how is that possible?” he recalled in an interview. “Because we produce 50 graduates a year.”

Prof. Tokuhiro tallied the results of other programs across the continent and found that fewer than 1,000 people graduate with degrees in radiological sciences or nuclear engineering in North America. (He estimated that for every one of those graduates, nuclear industry employers hire 10 times as many mechanical, chemical and other engineers who did not study nuclear engineering directly.)

It compares these data with the likely retirement rates of workers at major nuclear employers, as well as with a number of announced nuclear projects.

“We don’t have enough new graduates,” concluded Prof. Tokuhiro. “There’s a gap between what industry needs and what universities produce.”

Luca Oriani, global director of engineering services at Westinghouse, disagrees. The reactor supplier hires almost exclusively college graduates with little or no industry experience, he said, then trains and retains them for as long as possible, usually for decades. The company has found that the supply of engineering talent is plentiful in Canada and elsewhere.

That’s not to say the competition isn’t fierce. Westinghouse once visited campuses a week before a job fair for prospective graduates to recruit before they met with competitors; now it offers them jobs a year before they graduate.

“I have over 2,000 engineers working for me,” Mr. Oriani said. “I still spend at least a week a month just going to different universities and talking to students and trying to see how we can get them to come to us before they go somewhere else.”

In an interview earlier this year, OPG CEO Ken Hartwick divided the industry’s workers into two groups: engineering and project management on one side; and trades such as boilermakers and electricians on the other. Availability of the former, he said, was not a problem, despite the aging workforce.

“I’m not worried about older people losing some of their experience because the younger people coming through our universities are brilliant,” Mr Hartwick said.

The other issue was the craftsmen. OPG competes for them not only with other nuclear utilities, such as Bruce Power, but also with many other construction projects, including hospitals and roads.

“Can we get our trading programs up and running fast enough? That’s the biggest challenge.”

Some in the Canadian nuclear industry say there is no shortage of talent here like there is in the U.S. and U.K., thanks to major refurbishments of multi-reactor reactors at the Darlington and Bruce stations in Ontario over the past decade. Those are major capital projects in their own right, requiring a significant workforce to complete.

“It’s kept a lot of the construction industry very engaged, and the rest of the (utility) workforce as well,” said Bob Walker, national director of the Canadian Council of Nuclear Workers, the umbrella organization for nuclear workers’ unions.

He confirmed that retirees are returning to work, but added that most nuclear employers offer generous pension plans that allow employees to retire relatively early.

“It’s been a running joke for as long as I can remember: Nobody ever retires, they just move on,” Mr. Walker said. “The industry plans for people to come back, and people plan for retirement and come back.”

Ms Tosh said CNL is hiring retirees, mostly in science and technology jobs where there has been little activity in recent decades.

“Some of these talents have not been fully utilized over the last few decades, so there are important experiences that some people have not gained in their careers,” she added.

Mr Walker said he did not believe the talent shortage would be a constraint on the industry’s ambitions – provided projects were planned well in advance. And that, he said, required certainty that they would actually be delivered.

“We need to plan what we’re going to build, where we’re going to build it, when we’re going to build it. And then we can engage with the future workforce and make sure we have the right skills.”