Last month, U.S.-based nuclear reactor vendor Westinghouse opened a 13,000-square-foot engineering office in Kitchener, Ont. The company wants to sell its products, including its flagship AP1000 reactor, in Canada while also serving international customers.
Having hired most of its 250 Canadian staff in the last three years, it now seeks to hire 100 more engineers. It’s recruiting at a moment when, after a decades-long lull, skilled nuclear workers find themselves in high demand.
China and Russia have long dominated construction activity, while Western countries stagnated; Canada’s newest power reactor was completed in the early 1990s. But efforts to decarbonize the electricity sector have coalesced into support for designing and building new reactors, even as aging facilities are overhauled – leading to a proliferation of announced nuclear projects.
Whether there’s enough engineering talent to execute them all, however, is a question vigorously debated within the nuclear industry, here and abroad.
According to a survey the Canadian Nuclear Association conducted five years ago, the industry directly employs 33,000 people – up from 30,000 in 2012. Large employers include Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power, which operate large nuclear plants, as well as uranium mining giant Cameco Corp. CCO-T and Canadian National Laboratories, which operates the Chalk River research facility.
That survey is now being updated, and while results have not been finalized, employment appears to have grown another 10 to 15 per cent during the past five years. But the sheer volume of announced projects implies more rapid growth.
OPG recently began early work to refurbish four reactors at its Pickering station. The eight-reactor Bruce station, already one of the world’s largest, is in the early stages of a planned expansion that could add four new large reactors.
AtkinsRéalis, steward of Canada’s homegrown Candu technology, is racing to develop a modernized 1,000-megawatt reactor it calls the Monark. It’s among the most active hirers on Nuclear Jobs Canada, an industry job board.
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is hiring at its Chalk River facilities, a Second World War-era facility that has been extensively modernized in recent years. It’s looking to populate its new laboratories and replace retiring workers.
“Nuclear was a little bit quiet for a while, and now it’s coming back,” said Janet Tosh, CNL’s vice-president of human resources.
“So we are having to build up that talent pipeline. But it’s not just science and technology people we’re looking for. We’re looking for technicians, machinists, certified trade workers.”
And then there’s relative newcomers to Canada, such as Westinghouse. Another U.S.-based reactor vendor, 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 U.S. and Britain, both of which have seen limited reactor construction for decades. Reports abound that nuclear employers, desperate for talent, have lured long-retired professionals back into the work force.
Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering published a 250-page report examining the potential barriers to a major build-out of new “advanced” reactors. It identifies labour availability as a key constraint.
“Utilities have generally not retained the talent on their staff to execute these large projects given the limited deployment of nuclear technology in the past 30 years in the United States,” the report says.
“This shortfall in talent could become equally limiting across the supply chain, operations, and regulatory organizations that must support any large-scale growth in nuclear deployment.”
Akira Tokuhiro, a professor at Ontario Tech University, which has one of the largest nuclear engineering programs in North America, has noticed major nuclear employers pledging to hire hundreds of workers apiece on LinkedIn.
“And I thought, how can that be?” he recalled during an interview. “Because we’re producing 50 graduates a year.”
Prof. Tokuhiro added up the output from other programs across the continent, and determined that fewer than 1,000 people graduate with a degree in radiation science or nuclear engineering in North America. (He figures that for every such graduate, nuclear employers hire 10 times as many mechanical, chemical and other engineers who’ve not studied nuclear directly.)
He compares that against likely retirement rates for workers at major nuclear employers, as well as the many announced nuclear projects.
“We don’t have enough new graduates,” Prof. Tokuhiro concluded. “There’s a disconnect between what the industry needs, and what the universities are producing.”
Luca Oriani, Westinghouse’s global chief engineering services officer, disagrees. The reactor vendor almost exclusively hires graduates with little or no industry experience, he said, and then trains and retains them as long as possible, typically decades. The company has found the supply of engineering talent abundant, in Canada and elsewhere.
That’s not to say competition isn’t fierce. Westinghouse used to visit campuses a week ahead of job fairs for coming graduates to recruit before they met with competitors; now it’s offering them jobs as early as a year before graduation.
“I have over 2,000 engineers working for me,” Mr. Oriani said. “I still spend at least a week month just going to different universities and discussing with students, and trying to see how do we get them to come to us before they go somewhere else.”
In an interview earlier this year, OPG chief executive officer Ken Hartwick divided the industry’s labour into two groups: engineering and project management on one side; and trades, such as boilermakers and electricians, on the other. Availability of the first group, he said, has not been a problem, an aging work force notwithstanding.
“I’m less worried about the older person losing some of the experience, because the younger people coming through our universities are brilliant,” Mr. Hartwick said.
Tradespeople were another matter. OPG competes for them not just with other nuclear utilities such as Bruce Power, but with many other construction projects, including hospitals and roads.
“Can we ramp up our trades programs fast enough? That’s the biggest challenge.”
Some in Canada’s nuclear industry say talent isn’t as scarce here as it is in the U.S. and Britain, thanks to major multi-reactor reactor refurbishments at Ontario’s Darlington and Bruce stations over the past decade. They’re major capital projects in their own right, requiring significant manpower to execute.
“That’s kept a lot of building trades very engaged, and it’s kept the regular work force [of utilities] engaged,” said Bob Walker, national director of the Canadian Nuclear Workers’ Council, an umbrella organization of nuclear sector unions.
He confirmed that retirees are re-entering the work force, but added that most nuclear employers offer generous pension plans, allowing workers to retire relatively early.
“That’s been a running joke for as long as I can remember: No one ever retires, they just change positions,” Mr. Walker said. “The industry plans on people coming back, and people plan on retiring and coming back.”
Ms. Tosh said CNL is hiring retirees, mainly in science and technology roles where there’s been little activity in recent decades.
“Some of this talent hasn’t really been capitalized on in the last couple of decades, so there are key experiences that some people haven’t had in their careers,” she said.
Mr. Walker said he didn’t believe talent scarcity will prove a constraint on the industry’s ambitions – provided projects are planned well in advance. And that, he said, requires certainty that they will actually proceed.
“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 work force and make sure we have the right skills.”