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Welders wanted: France steps up recruitment drive as nuclear crisis deepens

Welders wanted: France steps up recruitment drive as nuclear crisis deepens

Welders wanted: France steps up recruitment drive as nuclear crisis deepens
Nov 29, 2022 1 min, 36 secs

PARIS, Nov 29 (Reuters) - French power giant EDF (EDF.PA) is looking to recruit a new generation of welders, pipe-fitters and boiler makers to fix its ageing nuclear reactors and build more of them, as Europe's energy crisis rekindles the allure of atomic power.

So much so that EDF, which has a reputation for delays and cost overruns in building nuclear plants, has had to fly in around 100 of them from the United States and Canada, it said this month.

It has already seen its electricity output this year drop to a 30-year low due to a record number of outages.

EDF estimates that France's nuclear industry needs to recruit between 10,000 and 15,000 workers a year over the next seven years.

EDF alone must find 3,000 new workers a year over that time - or 15% of the workforce currently deployed at its nuclear plants - up from 2,500 in the 2019-2022 period.

"These are pretty ambitious targets," said Clement Bouilloux, manager for France at energy consultancy EnAppSys, noting that the scale of the country's plans for new reactors could make it challenging to recruit the right workforce.

In construction, plans for the new nuclear plants will have to compete for workers building other big infrastructure projects ranging from new trainlines around Paris to a tunnel through the Alps to Italy.

Workers repairing plants affected by the corrosion issues - which first emerged a year ago - are required to operate in a part of the reactor where radiation is high, so they can only spend a limited amount of time in it.

Before the war in Ukraine, successive administrations sought to reduce France's reliance on nuclear energy, not build new reactors, they say.

Opposition from environmental groups and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan made investing in nuclear reactors a less popular choice even in a country that still derives 70% of its electricity mix from atomic energy.

This year, however, he announced the construction of new reactors, as the war in Ukraine and the push for low carbon energy production make nuclear attractive again.

"Clearly, we didn't hire people to build...reactors, we hired people to dismantle them," he said, noting that the government's 2019-2023 energy policy roadmap envisaged the shutdown of 12 reactors by 2035.

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