Survey of the strategic competence needs regarding nuclear technology at present and in the future

The Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) has been commissioned by the government to present a strategy for future directions and priorities regarding the nuclear technology research. This should be done before the end of year 2001. A part of this work is to determine the national future need of competence and how the competence needs should be satisfied. ES-konsult has been assigned by SKI to evaluate the competence needs - based on a questionnaire survey - for the industry and SKI, especially critical nuclear competence that is needed to maintain safety. The nuclear competence can be decreasing as a result of the political decision that the nuclear power should be phased out in Sweden. The purpose is to use the results from the questionnaire as a starting point and then investigate the demands on relevant education at universities. The questionnaire has been prepared in cooperation with SKI. Data has been collected about strategic nuclear technical competencies divided into eleven different defined competence areas. The questions concerned the number of employees with education from universities, within each of one of the eleven competence areas defined. The need of competent employees should also be predicted looking 10 years ahead from now. When it comes to employees today, they have been divided into different categories depending on education, age and experience. The staff turnover for the last five years was also asked for. In the questionnaire there were also some general questions regarding this matter. The collected data covers 709 employees on the power plants, SKI, SKB, Westinghouse Atom, Studsvik, DNV Nuclear Technology, SQC and KSU. The data is presented and discussed in the report. The role of specific nuclear technical competence in the strategic competence areas is especially discussed. In some cases the competence areas consists of general technical and scientific knowledge that will be available in the future regardless of the nuclear power shutdown. By reviewing the collected data it seems that the industries and authorities are supplied with highly educated staff that can satisfy the need of strategic nuclear technical competence today. With respect to the presented results it is discussed how the requirements that the need of nuclear technical competence has on the education can be fulfilled. In order to do this it is necessary to analyse the demands that the need of nuclear technical competence puts on relevant educations, mainly those that contains reactor and core physics, reactor technology, nuclear safety and nuclear chemistry. It is also necessary to explore which educations should be offered in the future and how the industry can utilize the capacity of education in practice