Piece in the Guardian yesterday about the HSE's 2nd quarterly report on their Generic Design Assessment of proposed nuclear stations. As you might expect, the Guardian has a more sensational take on the situation than the HSE. One thing that struck me was HSE's comment that they are having to use more "technical support contractors". I chatted to some old colleagues a few weeks ago who vouchsafed that they are being inundated with work - particularly training up scientists and engineers for future operational work. The country has a huge skills gap given that the last station to be built was Sizewell B, that the research and engineering expertise was scattered to the four winds upon privatisation (20 odd years ago - tempus fugit!) etc. It rather makes one wonder if there are going to be a few repetitions of mistakes from the past.
Which reminds me of when I started at EST and became aware of all the problems that there had been with condensing boilers. Of course, those problems were just the same as we'd experienced in the power industry for years. Interesting that there'd been no cross-fertilisation - and it begs the question of how much more knowledge is being re-discovered, how much research is being duplicated, just because we are not good at cross-sector learning.
Back to the HSE. Their report does highlight a number of areas where the plant designers have been slow in bringing forward information or (more worrying, this) where the quality of what is being provided is poor. Delays happen, of course. This puts pressure on HMG ultimately to ensure "the lights don't go out" which I think they will achieve by breaking CO2 pledges (see my post from 24th August). Time will tell. But if there are quality issues now, what is likely to be the situation further down the line - especially if delays mount up and there is generated a tendency to cut corners?
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