And it’s not just a lack of engineers. The global shortage runs from uranium miners to the waste-disposal experts who tidy up at the end of the nuclear cycle. “I’ve got colleagues running around Florida trying to find people to take their knowledge before they die,” says Peter Waggitt, a uranium production consultant to the IAEA. “Most of the senior experts in uranium mining are pushing 50 and some of the best are over 70.”

A fall in uranium prices in the late 1980s left scant incentive to enter the mining industry, while leaky, badly constructed mines gave uranium mining a bad name. But the ore is now trading at around $60 per pound, in real terms more than four times the 1990 price. More than 500 companies are involved in the sector and the IAEA says at least 30 new uranium mines will open before 2015. The workforce, says Waggitt, is struggling to keep pace.

In May 2008, BHP-Billiton said it would take longer than originally estimated to expand its Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine in Australia because the worldwide mining boom had created greater competition among skilled workers, higher prices and shortages of equipment. A skills shortage still hangs over the site, the world’s biggest uranium deposit. The Australian government has estimated the country needs around 6,000 extra skilled workers during construction. Analysts have put the full expansion cost at $20 billion or more. Waggitt sees these problems as a warning to the wider industry: “Uranium mining is at the very beginning. If there is a problem in this sector it is a problem for the entire nuclear cycle.”
 

In an attempt to tackle the shortfall, Finland is rushing out a blueprint that outlines how to get more young people studying nuclear energy. From his offices next to the presidential palace in Helsinki, chief engineer Aurela heads a 20-person committee which is assessing the needs of Finland’s future nuclear workforce. The country wants to build another large plant at Olkiluoto by 2020. To staff such grand plans, Aurela says Finland will need to produce at least 100 nuclear specialists a year. At the moment it produces just 20 to 30.

After talks with industry, university and government officials, the committee will soon present a detailed report on what to do next. “It will come out in spring,” Aurela says. “We don’t have time for a year. We need to get the measures in place. We know some of them already — we only have two nuclear physics professors in Finland and we already know that that is too few.”

One of those professors is Rainer Salomaa, who first got into nuclear as a way to escape the isolated southwestern port city of Turku where he grew up, 160 km (99 miles) from where he now teaches near the capital. Producing the next generation of nuclear experts, says Salomaa, 62, should not be left to chance.

“With the development at Olkiluoto, people are much more excited,” he says, sitting in his Aalto University office with its stacks of curled papers and heavy text books. “But when you are training new people, just to get an ordinary professional it takes around five years. It’s a very slow process — and to get a professor it takes 15 years — that’s one of the bottlenecks.”

Student numbers in basic nuclear engineering at the university have gone up, to around 30 a year from about 12 in 2000, the low-point of the industry in Finland. Masters students in the field — who it is hoped will become the next generation of top-notch nuclear specialists — have risen to 6-10 per year from 2-3 a decade ago. That’s an improvement, but nothing like what Salomaa says is needed. “For the moment we will survive, but once the two new units start at full speed the burning need will continue.

“The difficulty is that the number in the new generation anywhere is getting smaller. There’s huge global competition for the bright students — they are wanted in economics, law — and engineering is not as fashionable as it used to be.”
 

Finding the right people to fill all those jobs will not be easy. Before padding in flipflops and socks to a lecture theater, Salomaa explains what he is looking for in a student. “The courage to tackle non-definable problems,” he says. “With nuclear engineering, you really have to have the courage not to give up.”

At the same time, he wants students with a deep respect for safety and rules. His generation was rattled by two major nuclear accidents and had safety taught to them like a mantra. “The safety culture is a question of attitude. It has to be there from the start.”

Few people have that mix: mathematically gifted, able to think outside the box, but also happy to abide by rules. On a grey, mild day in late September, some 30 young Finns who have at least some of those attributes listen to a lecture in a boxy, functional building on Aalto University’s sprawling science and technology campus. “I could work in the nuclear industry, I think it has a future,” says Karita Kajanto, a 21-year-old energy technology student in crisp, word-perfect English.

Like her other classmates, though, Kajanto notes that some are not so upbeat about nuclear physics. “Here at this university people have positive views but some friends studying humanities — and some people who don’t really know about it — they have quite aggressive views that what we are doing is wrong,” she says. To give them choices after graduation, many of her classmates also take classes in the much trendier renewable energies such as solar and hydropower.

One problem is cultural. “The way nuclear companies are managed and the way young people want to work are different,” Cap Gemini’s Lewiner says. “Nuclear companies can be quite hierarchical, it is very controlled — you are allowed to do this and not that. Some of that is needed of course, but it has to be softened.”

Changing that image will take time — but it is possible. A recent study by polling company Gallup showed nearly one third of young Finns are in favor of nuclear power, the highest since the survey began in 1982. Ten percent were against it and the rest were neutral.