Nuclear energy’s lost generation
By Sylvia Westall
Mon Nov 29, 2010 8:25am EST OLKILUOTO, Finland (Reuters) – On a flat, low-lying island nestled in crisp waters off the west coast of Finland, the first nuclear power plant ordered in Western Europe since 1986 is inching toward start-up. Over 4,000 builders and engineers are at work on the sprawling Olkiluoto 3 project, whose turbine hall is so cavernous it could house two Boeing 747 jets stacked on top of each other. When it is dark, which in winter is most of the day, enormous spotlights throw into focus scores of scaffolding towers and the red hauling equipment that encircle the grey, unfinished reactor building. The heavy reactor vessel, made to withstand temperatures over 350 degrees Celsius, has been gingerly lifted into place by two cranes. Inside the building, a dozen workers carrying a single pipe across their shoulders create a human caterpillar that carefully wends its way through tarpaulin-covered tunnels lit by lamps and chinks of daylight. Walking through the expansive complex, still missing a domed cover on the reactor building, it takes a while to make out a peculiar but important detail: many of the engineers and building experts working here are in their late 50s and early 60s; some are in their 30s, but few are in between. There’s a hole in the nuclear workforce, not just in Finland but across the Western world. For the moment, the operator of the Olkiluoto 3 plant, power utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO), is getting by with its most experienced staff. As those workers retire, though, the skills shortage could become a crisis. “The nuclear industry has been in the desert for years and years and the question is how to revamp it and how to revamp human resources,” says Colette Lewiner from Cap Gemini, a consultancy firm which raised concerns about the aging nuclear workforce in a report in 2008 and has warned “there will be no nuclear power renaissance” without efforts to tackle the problem. “The industry needs to ramp up and it needs to do it quickly.” Like a growing number of nations, Finland sees nuclear power as vital to its future prosperity. Olkiluoto 3 is the biggest investment in the history of Finnish industry. Helsinki wants nuclear power to provide more than a third of the country’s electricity by 2020, reducing its dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels and energy imports from Russia. Globally, 15 countries are currently building 63 nuclear power plants, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.’s atomic body. More than 65 additional states, newcomers to the technology, are jostling for advice on nuclear power. Completion of Finland’s new 1,600 megawatt reactor, built by French energy giant Areva and designed to withstand a plane crashing into it, is running four years late and will turn out far more expensive than its original 3 billion euro price tag. Areva alone has already taken 2.7 billion euros in writedowns on the project. But delays and cost overruns are nothing compared to the skills crisis the project has helped expose, which is already affecting the nuclear sector around the world. “The global community is facing this big problem — where is this human resource?” says Yanko Yanev, head of the IAEA’s nuclear knowledge management unit, set up 10 years ago when the Vienna-based agency first sounded the alarm. “When we started this program, people said, ‘Ah, give us a break!’ Now they are realizing the problem is more complex than they had first thought.” …
