China to set up varsity for nuclear power research

China is planning to build a university dedicated to nuclear power research to meet the severe shortage of qualified people at its rapidly-expanding atomic energy facilities at home and abroad.

China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the country’s leading nuclear power developer and nuclear power plant operator, has signed a contract with the government of Tianjin municipality to invest in a nuclear technology university in the northeastern city, the official newspaper of the country’s science and technology ministry reported today.

The university would be built as a national-level institution and would function as a base for skill-training, master’s, PhD programs, and core-technology research and development (R&D), the Science and Technology Daily reported.

China has a comparatively an integral nuclear industrial system. However, few nuclear related fields such as nuclear fusion, uranium enrichment and post-processing “differ widely from each other, and the existing nuclear related majors in universities and colleges cannot satisfy the demand for talent,” the report said, citing Wan Gang, director of the China Institute of Atomic Energy.

Wan said only around 20 per cent of 2,300 graduates who were hired by CNNC were majored in nuclear-related courses. A CNNC development report had said colleges and universities could only satisfy less than half of the company’s demand for talent for the 13^th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), the paper said.

Wang Yinan, a researcher at the State Council’s Development Research Centre, stressed the importance of cultivating talent for nuclear power security. “China has many nuclear power projects and will continue to develop, which has led to a severe shortage of nuclear talent in power plant design, engineering construction, operations and security control,” Wang told state-run Global Times.

If something goes wrong, the front-line operators should “immediately recognise the fault and solve it”, Wang said. “Not enough qualified personnel is threatens nuclear power security.”

Besides massive expansion at home, China is also building nuclear power plants abroad. It has helped Pakistan in establishing several nuclear power plants and currently building two 1,100-MW reactors in Karachi with USD 6.5 billion assistance.

At home, China is currently operating 31 nuclear power units as of June 2016, with 23 more under construction. The China Electricity Council had said that year the country would have the second-most nuclear power plants in the world.

Many Chinese universities offer nuclear technology-related programs, including Tsinghua University, Peking University and Xi’an Jiaotong University.