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The prospect of a nuclear renaissance in the UK has resulted in a closer look at its supply chain capability. Katherine Williams reports on the National Metals Technology Centre’s conference, Building a Nuclear Future, held in Leeds, UK, in June.

Question – How many nuclear engineers does it take to fix the air conditioning? Answer – None, they just open the patio doors. This was the running joke at the National Metals Technology Centre’s conference, Building a Nuclear Future, held in a sweltering Leeds, UK, on 29-30 June.

Whether temperatures rose or fell when presented with the challenges and opportunities facing civil nuclear it is hard to say. Nevertheless, attendees were left with little doubt that if companies want a bite of the UK’s planned new build cherry they should act now.

The UK’s need to ‘keep the lights on’ was a common theme to many presentations with companies being frank about the stark decisions ahead. As Dr David Powell Regional Vice President of Westinghouse, UK, put it, ‘The UK Government needs to be committed to nuclear, we need low carbon generation as EU directives [on carbon reduction] kick in’. He then added that this move towards nuclear power generation, ‘should have happened five to 10 years ago’.

This was reflected in the presentation by Andy Storer, Programme Director for Rolls-Royce Civil Nuclear, who said that, in spite of many years of experience in nuclear submarine building, ‘we [Rolls-Royce] are not ready for civil nuclear’.

At present, the company foresees purchase orders being placed in 2012 for UK plants to be delivered in 2017. However, in Storer’s view, the UK supply chain is not even ‘50% ready’ for the challenges ahead, and he cautioned that delivery to the expected standards on time, ‘is hard’. He reminded suppliers that, ‘if we don’t step up to the plate, the supply chain elsewhere will be used’.

In an attempt to meet the growing needs of a global nuclear industry, which has an estimated 300 new plants to be built in the next 20 years, Rolls-Royce is planning three new factories – with two intended for Derby, UK. One factory will focus on submarine reactor cores, another on components for submarines and civil nuclear, and the third will have a purely civil nuclear remit.

Glenn Little of Doosan Babcock backed this up, saying that the company’s Renfrew site is currently manufacturing nuclear components, but ‘we will need extensive support from the supply chain’ moving forward as, ‘conditions in the factories of the supply chain are not good enough for nuclear new build…they need upgrades’. Materials supply is another area where there is an ‘enormous’ amount of work to be done, suggested Brian Ellis of Thompson Valves, Poole, UK. He said, ‘Qualification test facilities in the UK need to be dramatically improved. They may be planned, but they are not available now’. He also noted that, it is not yet known which codes of practice for design and construction of components of nuclear islands the UK will be working to – ASME or RCC-M.

With integrity

Structural integrity issues, such as radiation damage and corrosion still plague the industry, and with ever longer service lifetimes of 60-years plus expected, and necessarily strict safety requirements the conference heard that research into integrity remains vital.

Professor Andrew Sherry, Director of the Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University, UK, said ‘the refinement of materials is becoming more and more important’, new materials with improved properties, novel welding techniques and innovative surface finishes will be needed to address degredation issues and speed up the construction process. However, ‘understanding surfaces and surface engineering warrants a lot more research’.

Work coming out of Corus RD&T’s conventional power generation work, particularly that on grade properties, may be transferable. Peter Morris from the firm described projects to develop improved creep resistance in steels by looking at alloying and heat treatment. While alloying has been a focus in the past, Morris stated, ‘There is no good alloying response that I’m aware of which will
significantly increase creep resistance’.

One surprise to come out of this work, is that a lower tempering temperature appears to produce a finer more regular dispersion of precipitates with good weldability and no notch brittleness. Morris said that optimising heat treatment, ‘potentially [offers] a vast improvement on anything we have had before’.

Not only is there a need for continued R&D, but there is also a requirement for validated non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques.

‘Nuclear safety and reliability is established by a number of factors such as design materials and manufacturing control but only NDT establishes the true condition of the plant,’ said Russ Booler from the UK-based Inspection Validation Centre of Serco.

The global nuclear programme ‘places high demands on the non-destructive testing workforce. There just aren’t enough people’ he said. This means that testers will have to be drafted in from industries such as petroleum, shipbuilding and construction, areas with a higher tolerance of failure rates, which may present problems for the industry. The Programme for the Assessment of NDT in Industry (PANI) has shown that the NDT performance of non-nuclear manual ultrasonic operators is less than required or expected – the best detected 80% of defects and the worst only found 30%, ‘that level of performance is not acceptable to the nuclear industry’.

Given that the nuclear renaissance will be taking workers from these industries, there is a global need to ‘raise the bar of their performance’, through inspection validation, particularly, as ‘the number of reactors being built increases the chances that things will go wrong’.

Skills supply

The UK used to rely on nuclear power to provide one-fifth of its energy needs, however, no new plants have been built since 1995, and, in 2023, only one plant will remain operational unless new ones are delivered. ‘The nuclear sector has been a sunset industry looking to decommission,’ noted Clive Smith, Skills Development Director at Cogent the UK Sector Skills Council for nuclear,
emphasising the need for recruitment.

In 2009, just under 44,000 people were employed by the nuclear sector – the new build programme could generate 30,000 jobs, needing 1,000 apprentices per year between now and 2025, as well as around 400 graduates per year. Work from Cogent has sown that the UK does have many of the skills required to staff the nuclear renaissance, however the organisation is in the process of preparing a report to show where the gaps remain.

Little noted that the average age of welders at Doosan has decreased from 50 to 40-something, ‘and we are working to bring it down further’ through apprenticeships, but industry wide ‘there is a need to do much more in terms of training’.

Welding has always been important to nuclear, but it could become even more so if the ideas put forward by Gene Mathers of TWI in Great Abingdon, UK, come to fruition. The anticipated growth in nuclear generating capacity will create a greater need for heavy forgings of 300-600t, with the advantage of no long seams, fewer welds and fewer heat affected zones. However, there are a limited number of forgers globally that can produce them. It had been thought that the UK’s capability would be increased with the help of an £80m Government loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, however, this has recently been cancelled and the company has
suspended plans for a 15,000t press.

A possible solution, he said, may come from electron beam (EB) welding that could be used to produce large composite forgings. This is a single-pass process with good travel speeds that is, he said, ‘More than capable of competing with
the conventional part-weld processes used currently’.

The Astute class submarines have used EB welded QN steel that has been EB welded to replace high strength steel valve castings so there is some
experience of such techniques. Mathers believes that it may be possible to extend this knowledge to many large nuclear components, reducing the need for forgings and improving the cost profile.

As Smith noted, the ambitious UK timetable for operational new plant is no small task, ‘it’s like three Olympic [site] builds back-to-back between now and 2025’. If the UK can rise to these challenges there are significant opportunities to supply the global nuclear industry. Just don’t expect any help with the air conditioning.