There’s no doubt that events at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have dented confidence in what was being touted as the long-awaited renaissance of nuclear energy in the UK. Even though there have thankfully been no major knee-jerk reactions, the government has instigated a report on the implications of the accident for new-build plans on these shores, and completion of the generic design assessment of the new reactors has been put back until that report has been delivered in September.
That would seem an eminently sensible response. Yes, lessons need to be learned and acted on accordingly, but there’s a strong case for ensuring that the incident doesn’t derail the UK nuclear new-build programme by any significant amount. The government seems convinced that Britain still needs new nuclear power to help reduce national carbon dioxide emissions and to meet future energy needs.
Indeed, behind the scenes, all the major players are still jockeying for position as the plans for nuclear new-build are being progressed. Rolls-Royce and the French firm Areva have already revealed their hand: the two companies are working together on the design and manufacture of components for Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor design, which is likely to be used for at least four of the new nuclear reactors to be built in the UK. Areva has also reached an agreement with the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre which will act as its manufacturing sourcing and competence hub to identify and assist British manufacturers that want to enter the civil nuclear market for the first time.
Meanwhile the Rolls-Royce website currently has dozens of vacancies for engineering-related roles at its civil nuclear facilities in Warrington and Derby. These include pipeline material technologists, power electronics engineers, mechanical design engineers and turbine research experts. Rolls-Royce clearly still sees civil nuclear as an emerging part of its business, predicting that it will sustain as many as 10,000-15,000 jobs over 25 years, of which 45% will be engineers.
Another company that has been stealthily adding to its capabilities is Babcock which, after a series of acquisitions, has now amassed a workforce of more than 3,500 skilled employees in the civil nuclear sector. The expanded group was created by the acquisition of UKAEA Ltd, the commercial arm of the UK Atomic Energy Authority; nuclear services firm Alstec; and Bristol-based nuclear equipment designer Strachan and Henshaw. It then bought the nuclear services business of VT Group and integrated all of these outfits with its existing Babcock Nuclear Services. Those moves have given the group undoubted critical mass, enabling it to operate at all levels (tier 1, 2 and 3) to carry out the design and build of major nuclear structures, site operation and maintenance, and decommissioning and remediation.
The expansion has been the result of a carefully orchestrated business strategy overseen by Roger Hardy, managing director of Babcock’s nuclear business. “It’s because civil nuclear is such a rising market,” he says. “Certainly over the course of the next five to ten years in the UK there’s more work in the civil nuclear market than we can probably cope with. And internationally I’ve lost count of the number of countries that say they are going to start a new nuclear build programme. It’s a huge number. It’s a growing market. There are great opportunities.”
The challenge for Hardy has been integrating disparate organisations into one business. UKAEA Ltd was a publicly owned organisation before it joined Babcock. The nuclear business of VT had already gone through a privatisation process, while Strachan and Henshaw was a privately owned firm that came with a historic background. “It was not easy bringing together what appeared to be three similar organisations which, when you delved down, had very different cultures. It was a real spread,” says Hardy.
“What we ended up with was almost too much capability. We can manage sites, we can run big projects, we can do lots of detailed engineering, we’ve got a huge number of engineers and scientists – it’s almost too much to mentally cope with. So focusing in is key.”
As a result, the old structures have gone and all of Babcock’s nuclear resources have been reorganised. Some businesses and labs have been moved to new locations, while others have been merged. Hardy says the business has been organised to be customer-focused, with employees either working on management and decommissioning projects such as Sellafield, Dounreay, Harwell or Winfrith, or involved in the power generation market, either on new-build or keeping the existing stations going. Hardy admits that it has been an arduous process that has taken longer than he had originally expected.
“After the acquisition process the nuclear business had 28 different sites in the UK,” he says. “It took me two months to get around them all, because some were in remote places and were hard to get to. There had to be a slimming-down: 28 was too many and in a couple of places we had four or five facilities within two or three square miles. Now we have the right hubs in place, with different areas of expertise dotted around different parts of the country, using management techniques and IT to get people working together from dispersed locations.”
The overlap was minimal, says Hardy, but inevitably it has led to some job losses. But he says the changes are already reaping rewards – the expanded business means Babcock can compete in virtually every sector of the civil nuclear market. “We can now do things that we couldn’t do before,” he says. “New-build is a good example of that, and some of the site clean-ups. Expansion has enabled us to take on larger tier 1 contracts and, as a result, our customers are thinking about us differently and approaching us in different ways.”
Hardy says there are no plans to hive off any parts of the business. He admits there are some contracts, particularly internationally, that Babcock wouldn’t bid for if they came up again. That’s a corollary of the wealth of opportunities that now exists on home shores.
Managing Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) sites remains a crucial part of Babcock’s business, and Hardy says that notable achievements have been made in recent months. At Dounreay, emptying of the Fast Reactor east pond is now almost complete. The process has involved draining 500m3 of water in preparation for removing the concrete and bitumen liner as the former reactor is pulled apart. Previously the sludgy water had been removed by agitating and filtering the suspended solids. But the project team has implemented a process to capture the remaining mass in a basket, minimising the quantity of filters for grouting and storing in waste drums.
Meanwhile at Sellafield, three-and-a-half years after the Calder Hall cooling towers came down, a new 122m-high concrete ventilation discharge stack has been erected using a slip-forming process. The stack will, when operational, allow further decommissioning work to commence on legacy plants that are nearing the end of their lives.
Hardy says that this kind of work proves that the company can do difficult projects, requiring a lot of engineering, on complex legacy sites. “It’s what the business is about,” he says. “We know how to manage difficult projects, and we know how to manage sites. That combination of activities is what I’m looking for in the future of our nuclear business.”
The NDA is completing work at Dounreay to take the site to what is known as the interim end stage. Babcock has teamed with URS International and CH2M Hill to bid for the work against a rival consortium comprising Energy Solutions EU and Amec Nuclear Holdings. “That competition process is moving forward. And I never double guess competitions. But we think we have formed the best team possible to do the best job possible,” he says.
On the new-build side, Babcock is positioning itself to offer a range of services including the design and build of major systems, equipment and civil construction. The mechanical and electrical work on the stations is what Hardy refers to as the “real nitty gritty”, making sure the reactor fits into its designated area and that all the supporting equipment is assembled and installed to the requisite high standards. He reckons there are lots of companies out there that say they are capable of building reactors, but that much of their experience was gained many years ago on the previous generation of reactors and that their knowledge has been lost.
“Many of the people involved are retired or dead,” he says. “So in many cases companies will have to build capability where it doesn’t currently exist. I think that Babcock is at an advantage because the last significant nuclear construction work was done at our site at Devonport. We have retained the necessary capability. We are the largest nuclear engineering company in the UK, so we have the scale to be able to cope with the new-build process.”
Hardy says that, with skills shortages a problem across much of the nuclear industry, the companies that are going to excel will be those that can employ their own workforces rather than rely on agency workers and subcontractors. He says that Babcock’s naval nuclear programme means it has invested heavily in training. “We have been training people on project management and site management – they know the standards that it takes. Making sure that ingredient is contained within our proposals for new-build is very important,” he says.
Hardy reckons that, perversely, the skills challenge provides for huge opportunity for people coming into this sector. For engineers leaving university and just beginning their careers, he says that the nuclear sector offers unrivalled prospects – both on new-build here and on high-profile foreign projects like the Iter prototype fusion reactor planned for construction in Cadarache in France.
He says: “There is an opportunity for a whole bunch of new people to come in and re-establish the nuclear industry that we need for the next 30 or 40 years. The nuclear sector in general brings huge opportunity to work internationally, and my advice to anyone thinking about engineering is to look very seriously at this industry – you can have a great career here and in many parts of the world. The opportunities exist now.”