The UK’s nuclear industry is facing a skills crisis as experienced nuclear engineers approach retirement amid an acute shortage of UK graduates to replace them.

Fewer than 6 per cent of the estimated 100,000 people who work in the industry – including 23,500 at degree level – are under 24, while 31 per cent are aged 45 and over.

At British Energy, which operates eight nuclear power stations and is the UK’s biggest electricity provider, up to 40 per cent of staff are set to retire within the next ten years, according to David Barber, the head of training.

“How do you backfill that knowledge?” he asked, adding that it was a “big challenge”.

The industryis expected to need up to 1,000 new graduates a year for the next 15 years, to replace retiring staff, continue operating power plants and help to manage a £60 billion-plus programme to decommission ageing nuclear reactors.

If, as is widely expected, the Government embarks on a drive to build new power stations to replace those coming off line, the demand for skilled staff will be even greater.

But Jean Llewellyn, project director for the National Skills Academy for Nuclear, a government scheme to encourage greater training, said that, because enthusiasm for nuclear power waned in the 1980s and 1990s, no British university now offers a dedicated nuclear engineering honours degree course.

Imperial College, London is set to launch one next year that will supply 50 graduates a year, but until then the industry is recruiting from other engineering disciplines and training people up.

Ms Llewellyn said: “If we don’t address this issue now we will have no alternative but to recruit skilled staff from overseas.”

Mr Barber said that nuclear engineers and managers now in their fifties and early sixties entered the industry in the 1960s and 1970s, when the last generation of plants were under construction. Their looming departure represents a greater loss than 40 per cent in terms of the total accumulated knowledge and expertise.

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