The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have just published a report on jobs that are generated by nuclear power plants. The title of the report is Measuring Employment Generated by the Nuclear Power Sector. The NEA and IAEA collaborated with employees at Areva, the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (Idaho, USA), the Generation-IV International Forum secretariat, the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, the US Nuclear Energy Institute, PriceWaterHouseCoopers Strategy Group, Rosatom Central Institute, and the University of Stuttgart to generate the report.
The report says, “The nuclear energy sector employs a considerable workforce around the world, and with nuclear power projected to grow in countries with increasing electricity demand, corresponding jobs in the nuclear power sector will also grow. This report generalizes and simplifies the modelling efforts of the OECD member countries (where macroeconomic models are generally available) to make them more applicable to other economies, in particular, those IAEA member states (where macroeconomic models might be less developed).”
The report suggested that about twelve hundred professional and construction staff produce twelve thousand labor-years during the typical ten years of site preparation and construction of a one gigawatt advanced light water reactor.
About six hundred administrative, operational, maintenance and permanently contracted staff will be employed each year over a fifty-year operating period. During that time, around thirty thousand labor-years are expended.
After a reactor is permanently shut down, about five hundred people are employed each year over a ten-year period of decommissioning generating about five thousand labor-years. Then over the next forty years, about eight employees will deal with spent nuclear fuel from the reactor for about three thousand labor-years.
Adding these numbers together yields about fifty thousand direct labor-years per gigawatt for the construction, operation and decommissioning of the reactor. Total employment over the entire life cycle of a one-gigawatt nuclear power reactors should be about two hundred thousand labor-year according to the report.
The report says, “While the purpose of this report is to help member country experts determine the levels of inputs (particularly labor) flowing into the nuclear power sector, these inputs depend on the state of development of the nuclear power sector in a particular economy.” The report was completed in 2016. It was just published as a result of an agreement that was reached by NEA and IAEA for both of these organizations to publish the report.
The global nuclear industry has set the “Harmony” goal of having nuclear power provide about twenty five percent of the world’s electricity by 2050. The current nuclear generating capacity will have to be tripled to reach that goal. This means that about a thousand gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity will have to be constructed by 2050. When Goeffrey Rothwell of the NEA presented the findings of the report to the World Nuclear Association Annual Symposium in September of 2017, he stated that it would be necessary to have peak direct employment in the nuclear sector of about eight hundred thousand labor-years per year.
One problem with this rosy forecast is that a lot of the international nuclear workforce is reaching retirement age and there are not enough people entering the nuclear workforce to make up for the losses. A lot of people will have to be recruited and trained if the Harmony goal is to have any chance of being achieved.