Australia will need to significantly scale up local nuclear education and training to build sufficient expertise for the multi-decade Aukus submarine plan, experts say.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is expected to unveil the plan on Tuesday morning AEDT, with the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the US president, Joe Biden.
The Australian government estimates that Aukus will support 20,000 jobs over 30 years, across the Australian Defence Force, the public service and private industry.
It poses a looming challenge to educate, train and recruit the necessary personnel, but experts say Australia has a good base from which to expand its nuclear industry.
Dr Patrick Burr, a senior lecturer in nuclear engineering at the University of New South Wales, said “we definitely have a healthy nuclear industry in Australia, but it’s often overlooked”, citing nuclear safeguards and research into nuclear materials, nuclear medicine and waste. “On the other hand … it needs to grow manyfold.”
Prof Gregory Lane, who convenes the master of nuclear science program at the Australian National University, agrees. “There’s a lot of knowledge about nuclear science. It’s required in all sorts of different areas: mining, health, sterilisation of materials for general industry, industrial gauging.”
UNSW administers the only nuclear engineering degrees in the country, while the ANU is the only one to educate students in nuclear science.
“The skills are available in Australia but there are specifics of [Aukus] that we’ve never had to deal with and they’re going to have to be developed over time,” Lane said, adding: “Fundamentally, we don’t have a nuclear power program in Australia.”
The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto), a government agency, runs a nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.
Lane describes the Ansto reactor as “one of the most technologically advanced reactors of its type”, which produces neutrons for experiments and to make medical isotopes. “But that’s a very different beast to a reactor that is used for power and then a reactor that you’re going put under water and needs to be absolutely failsafe.”
Burr and Lane agree that some nuclear personnel will need to be trained overseas. V Adm Jonathan Mead confirmed last week that some Royal Australian Navy officers were completing a nuclear reactor course in the US and also enrolled in UNSW and ANU programs.
Burr said UNSW had about 125 graduates each year across its undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, while Lane said more than 20 students were currently enrolled in the ANU master’s program.
For the nuclear-powered submarines, “suitably qualified and experienced personnel” will be required at three tiers of expertise, Burr said.
The first tier are those who are “nuclear aware”, which would require only several months of training, Burr said. “In a nuclear submarine … even something as simple as welding a pipe needs to be done by a nuclear-aware welder” – someone with additional training about the implications of working with nuclear-grade materials. “If the weld goes wrong while you’re at sea, it could be catastrophic.”
The second tier are people who “have somewhere between five and 10 years of experience, and they typically have an education in engineering as well”.
The third tier, requiring the most expertise, are those with 20 to 30 years’ experience and a PhD at a minimum.
UNSW modelling, led by Dr Edward Obbard, forecasts that operating and maintaining eight nuclear-propelled submarines would directly require several thousand tier 1 personnel, about 2,500 people at tier 2 and about 200 tier 3 subject matter experts.
Experts say scaling up local nuclear capabilities will require national coordination.
“This needs to be a coordinated, collaborative effort from all nuclear training and education institutions in Australia,” Burr said. “Ansto will have a crucial role to play, not in education, but in some level of training and some level of government advisory.”
Lane said: “We need to be looking at regulation, law, engineering, strategic studies, health – all of these things matter in supporting a nuclear submarine effort.”
Ansto declined to comment.
