How do you build a nuclear power plant? (and not be Mr Burns)

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. Well, sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies. The elementary school, the local tavern, the old age home. You must be very proud. No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy the sun. That's Mr Burns, the iconic evil villain from the long-running smash hit US cartoon series The Simpsons. He's selfish, greedy, amoral, mean, and he is, of course, the owner of a nuclear power station. For more than three decades, he has loomed large in people's imaginations as the face of the nuclear industry.

1:22But our guest on the Business Leader podcast this week thinks that is very unfair, and it's an image she's determined to change. I think people have images of nuclear waste which are probably derived from The Simpsons. So working with schools, we have a school council, so kids aged 11 to 15, I go and spend time with them. I love going in, you get all sorts of questions. I wonder if I have an inner Mr Burns. I don't, we're very nice.

1:51That's Julia Pike, who took up the role of Joint Managing Director of Sizewell Sea Nuclear Plant in early 2023. The plant on the Suffolk coast is due for completion in the mid-2030s and is expected to deliver£100bn worth of benefits to the UK economy, while providing another key source of clean energy. Building a nuclear power plant must be one of the toughest leadership challenges in business. It is highly complex, involving hundreds of stakeholders and a multi-billion pound budget. The UK hasn't completed a new plant for three decades. And of course, while managing all of this, you have to counter the Mr Burns effect, the idea ingrained in many that nuclear energy is unsafe and a bad idea, imposed by people who don't have your best interests at heart.

2:38Not to mention the memories people have of disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, which were global news stories. Japan has been hit by its biggest earthquake since records began. An explosion was heard and smoke seen at the power plant. The images of destruction and flooding coming out of Japan are simply heartbreaking. Julia Pike divides her time between Suffolk and London while the project is in its early stages. I caught up with her at the project's London offices to hear her modern progressive vision for the nuclear industry, which she is putting into practice as the project slowly unfolds.

3:10She began by telling me how she got into the nuclear industry in the first place. so I spent many years as a lawyer I qualified at Herbert Smith Freehills and then focused on infrastructure projects I've done all sorts of things defense transport and obviously power at some point I became a partner and then I rose to the dizzying heights for the head of power for Herbert Smith Freehills and having spent 10 years doing all the paperwork for Hinkley Point sea. And at the same time, I did the paperwork for the Swansea Bay Tartal Lagoon and for some biomass projects and for some wind projects. I thought that the best thing I could do, having sort of undertaken the 10 years of getting a nuclear power station into development, into actual construction, was to move across to be the developer and help get a copy project, as we'll see, into development.

4:03So that's what I did. I came across and was the development director and then became the joint managing director. And I was looking at your LinkedIn in profile and it kind of, it was, I found it a little bit amusing, but one of your sort of skills that's mentioned on there is nuclear decommissioning and you've been endorsed by several people. That's quite a unique skill to have. That's right. That's because during my legal career, I did the work to the legal work for the setup of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and then spent several years working for them in their competition program for who was going to manage their sites.

4:34And for something like Size Well C, it's such obviously a mammoth long-term project. And you must think at the beginning, okay, what are the precedents? Who can I speak to? And yet we haven't in the UK built a nuclear plant for at least three decades. So do you speak to people who've done it abroad? Do you speak to Hinkley Point? What's your kind of terms of reference? Yeah, that's a really good question. So as you say, the last nuclear power station to turn on in the UK was Sideswell B on the Suffolk coast in 1995. And then there was no nuclear new build in the UK until Hinkley Point C started to be built in 2016.

5:12So we talk obviously a lot to the Hinkley team and the joint managing director Nigel Kahn, my colleague, he was a delivery director of Hinkley and I spent years, as I said, doing the paperwork for Hinkley. So we're very well connected to the Hinkley project, both through our own experience and through lots and lots of colleagues and friendships. And then we talk a lot to people in EDF who have built Flamenville and who participate in the building of Olkiluto. In Finland, we have one of the board directors from Olkiluto is on our board, and that's also very useful. He brings a lot of his experience.

5:50And then one of the things about nuclear is it is actually extremely collaborative. So people don't tend to compete with each other in the industry. They tend to be extremely collaborative through organizations like the World Association of Nuclear Operators, there's a lot of sharing of technical expertise. There's a lot of sharing of expertise on financial structures. It's, as I say, a very collaborative industry and people want the best for their colleagues. So you can collaborate outside with, if you like, external people. Who are your kind of internal stakeholders for this project? So it's as well as he started off as an EDF project.

6:24It was owned by EDF as to 80 % and CGNs to 20%. And then a few years ago, the UK government essentially bought out the Chinese stake. And so now the project is owned by EDF and the UK government. And this is very much a project for Britain. So currently, the government has the vast majority of the shares, it's got around 85%, with the remainder being held by EDF. And then as is often in the press, we're in the middle of a big capital raise in which the government will effectively sell down some of its shareholding, and it hasn't decided exactly how much, but some tens of percents. So we end up with three groups of shareholders, the government being a continuing shareholder, which a lot of people really welcome in a nationally critical sector like nuclear.

7:09EDF remaining where it is now, and then incoming investors taking some percentage of the shares. And a lot of people have no idea of what a job like this might involve. Could you give me a flavour from, say, last week of the kinds of meetings and the kind of things you had to do, obviously, without giving away anything confidential. Yeah, no, I can understand that this is a huge thing. So when you start off a project, if you've got the idea, I would like to build a nuclear power station, you start off by saying, well, what's the design going to be? For us, we're really lucky because we can copy the design of Hinkley.

7:43We're building an exact above ground copy of Hinkley. And then you say, well, where are you going to build this? Size we'll see. So there's lots of work to characterize the ground. So So what's in the ground, you do archaeology. You, in the case of Syswell, find quite a lot of unexploded ordnance because it turns out part of the site was actually used for practising the new day landing. So you have all of that very safely removed involving a machine called Minewolf. And you apply for a lot of your consent. So you need, obviously, the big planning consent under the development consent order. You need a lot of environmental consents.

8:17You need consents for things like building access roads to the site. You need to work out where are you going to put your workforce? So where's the accommodation going to be for the workforce? And of course, you need to engage in a huge amount of dialogue with the government about what's going to be the economic model for your power station project. So for Hinkley, it had the contract for difference, which has been very successful for offshore wind in particular. For nuclear, it was held that the contract for difference wouldn't bring forward any new investment after Hinkley. And there were a couple of nuclear projects which failed.

8:50There was Wilbur, which was a Japanese project on the island of Anglesey. And there was a project up in Cumbria, which had a series of foreign utility owners, but also was abandoned. And so the government decided it was going to introduce the regulated asset-based model. So that's the same model that is used for the national grid. It's used for water. It's used for airports. So it's a well-trodden path, the regulated asset-based model. So it means it's economically regulated. but it's the first time it's been applied to the nuclear industry. And it's only the second time it's been applied to a single asset.

9:26So the first time for that was the Thames Tideway Tunnel, which has been a really successful project to prove the model. And so the second time it's being applied is for us. So on a daily basis, my focus is on building the team. We'll end up with around 1 ,500 size well employees and then our relationships with our supply chain, so entering into the contracts for all of the kit, the metalwork inside the plant, and the big civil structures around the plant, and all of the associated developments, so roads, accommodation, campus, etc. There's a lot of focus on working with the local community, so that's Suffolk Council and East Suffolk District Council, and the Town Council, and a lot of stakeholder groups, because we really recognise that when you're building something like SizeWell, You absolutely cause disruption to people.

10:18We create noise, we create traffic, we create light pollution. But we also bring huge amounts of benefit. So a lot of focus is on thinking about how can we maximise that benefit. So working with schools, we have a school council. So kids aged 11 to 15, I go and spend time with them about once a quarter. We are involved with the school in encouraging the kids to raise their aspirations. And that's quite a complicated subject. And we are told by the school that a lot of kids who have been in primary school during the COVID years have less self-confidence and are less able to present and want to perform.

10:59So the school has asked us to help them sponsor a big sing, which is getting the kids to just go out and sing to boost their self-confidence. So we're working with them on that. And when you say go into schools, and especially primary school children, they've got no filter, they're very, very honest. Are they excited about it or do they share some fears as well? They are, as you say, very honest. And so I love going in and get all sorts of questions. And it's always a mixture of, on the one hand, it's excitement. On the other hand, they will have heard things, watched The Simpsons, wonder if I have an inner Mr Burns.

11:37I don't. We're very nice. but part of this is very much about opening ourselves up, making ourselves more human, just helping people see that this can be a great career. There's a lot of focus on obviously the economic arrangements for the project. So finalising all of those arrangements with the government. So that's the Department for Energy Security Net Zero and with Ofgem. And then there's a lot of focus on the capital raise. So who are going to be the incoming investors, on what terms. and then obviously as you'd imagine there's enormous focus on what is happening on site so we have site offices we have around a thousand people on site the earthworks have started uh there are always safety issues welfare issues all the issues which come with building um a big piece of civil engineering which is ultimately going to be a nuclear power station and then also there is the equipment so what goes into the reactor um being manufactured and so there is a big programme of quality inspection that goes on to make sure that everything's made to the right quality and we don't have any sort of last minute surprises, which are some of the things you've seen raise problems in some of the other nuclear power station projects which have been built in France and Finland.

12:49And just to pick up on a couple of those responsibilities, so you talked about hiring and the vast number of people that are going to be hired for this project. Have you got time to oversee any of that? Can you influence it? So, I mean, it's my job together with Nigel, my joint managing director, it's our job to build the executive team. And then it's the job of the executive team to build their teams below and so on in waves. With the executive team, we've been very careful to balance people who have historically worked in the nuclear industry in the UK, which means that most recently they would have worked for EDF because EDF acquired the UK's civil operating nuclear industry in around about 2008.

13:29with people who are coming in from outside. So we get a really broad spectrum of experience of other infrastructure projects outside the nuclear sector and of other companies, because SizeWell is going to be a big company delivering a project. Again, on the question of workforce, something that I know is very important to you is inclusion, diversity and inclusion. And obviously we know of what's happening in America, that's a bit on the back foot at the moment. A lot of companies are roaring back at those commitments. But the first thing you see when you step in this office This is a sign saying, step this way with a rainbow symbol into an inclusive space.

14:02So are you putting in quotas or how are you making sure that you've got such, you know, quite so far impressive figures on diversity, certainly with female representation? Well, so there's a sector target for the nuclear industry, which was set by government a few years ago, and that's to have 40 % women in nuclear by 2030. We're beating that. We have currently 43 % of women in our employee base, and we actually have a 65 % female executive. And it's much less about meeting quotas, and it's more about what's going to make this a successful project. So nuclear is much less popular among women than it is among men.

14:38And I can't help feeling that that's something to do with the fact that nuclear has historically been a very male-dominated place to work. We're doing something which is really important for society. So we're building 7 % of the nation's electricity. We need to employ lots of people's kids. We need to employ lots of people. We want those people to be men and women. We don't want to artificially discourage 50 % of the available people to come and work on the project. And we're doing something which is very significant for the people in Leyston, where the power station is, so on the Suffolk coast.

15:11and I think that if you have a workforce which is better mirroring of society we're just going to do a better job in terms of making the project acceptable to the people who live locally and in terms of attracting the best talent which occurs across the population in all shapes and sizes to come and work in our project and as I said because the project's really important for the nation it's really important that we get the best people. So to do that did you have quotas for the number of shortlisted candidates or the number of actual people who got the jobs or did you just work harder to push out you know information that the jobs existed we've just worked harder to make the jobs attractive to women and to people roughly in proportions which mirror society we have a lot more work to do in terms of the ethnic diversity of our workforce but it's not been done through quotas.

16:06It's been done through making the jobs attractive. And then there is an element to which people, it's a human tendency, will recruit to a degree in their own image. So once you have a balanced executive, you're more likely to have a balanced senior team below the executive, and then all the way down the organisation, which means that then as you look at succession plans, you will naturally have candidates available who more mirror proportions of different groups within society than just white men.

16:42You talked about women on the executive leadership team, but what about the much larger part of the workforce, lower down? Well, I completely agree. So our own employees, but who tend to be white collar employees, are 43 % women. And we're not aiming to have a predominance of women. We're aiming for roughly speaking 50-50 over the balance of time in the project. But we now need to look at who's going to come and work on the site itself and who's going to form the construction workforce. Construction is hugely male-dominated and we don't imagine we'll get anywhere near 50-50. But we do want to make sure that as many women as want to come to work at the site feel comfortable doing so.

17:23We do want it to be a better balanced workforce because women who come to work at the site will feel more comfortable where there's a reasonably sized group of other women. And some of this, we hope, is about natural changes in the construction industry. So things become less manual, they become more automated, more modular construction, much more use of digital. And it's about things like whether or not we provide childcare. We do intend to provide childcare. We're really interested in looking at what are the barriers to people coming to work. So it sounds frivolous, but it isn't. During COVID, a lot of people acquired dogs.

17:56It's going to be a lot better for us to attract people if we provide dog daycare, why wouldn't we? What we want to do is to attract people to come and work for us who might otherwise feel that they couldn't because they don't have anyone to mind the dog. So you were mentioning to me earlier that you have to, in effect, build this huge hotel just for your workforce on site. So that might have to have the childcare and the kind of pet facilities there as well, perhaps. Yeah, and we have an ambition. Well, in fact, we have an obligation under our planning consent for at least one third of the workforce to come from the local area.

18:27so there's a lot of people who already live in Suffolk who we would like to come to work for us for whom the childcare and the possibly dog daycare will be very relevant then we will be asking a lot of people who currently work in our London offices to move out to Suffolk so again that will be highly relevant for them because one of the barriers facing people when they're looking at moving from London which is obviously well provided with childcare early years etc is what's then going to be available when they move to a much more remote part of the country, which has at the moment few facilities of that nature.

19:02And yes, absolutely, we will look to make childcare available in a way which encourages the best workforce not only to come to work for us, but also to be retained. There are currently around 1 ,200 people working on the project, which is expected to support 70 ,000 jobs during construction. The 3.2 gigawatt plant should be able to supply enough electricity for 6 million homes. So this is a huge critical national infrastructure project that the UK has to get right. The job you've got in terms of project management is so huge compared to the you know the average projects people are thinking about in the UK even if it's you know I don't know like building a school or hospital or something like that this is a different scale but are there any sort of lessons that you've learned so far doing it that you think would be useful to people doing more typical projects.

19:54Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the early years of my legal career, I worked on some PFI projects. And then, of course, we saw everybody turn against PFI and it died off. And I think one of the contributions to that was that the PFI industry didn't really think hard enough about what contribution was it going to make to the society around it. So it was great to have the school and the hospital, but they weren't really thinking about how to bring in people from the community into being employed in these schools, hospitals, etc. I'm not sure that there was very much focus on how to build skills in the construction industry.

20:31SARS-CoV-2 is so big, we have to think about all of those things. But I think that really, it's better for more projects to think much more holistically about what they can do to improve the society around them a bit, what they can do to improve the construction skills and the skills in project management, et cetera, and sort of be slightly bigger than their own narrow ambition. When you're doing something really long-term, and obviously lots of businesses very long-term, I would have said that things that come to the top of my mind in terms of advice are very much what goes around comes around.

21:05So if you're going to fall out with people in a very long-term project, it's probably going to come and bite you again at some point. I'd have said that it's important in very long-term things in particular to be human. Something like a project is a huge team effort. I'm not a huge believer in the concept of heroic leadership. I'm more a believer in the concept of servant leadership. Everybody's got a part to play, whatever they're doing. And the more you can encourage an atmosphere in which people show their more human side to each other, and you're able to show human interest in people, the more people will be motivated to do their best job.

21:41The other reason it's obviously such a long-term project is because you have to think about what happens to the nuclear material afterwards. So how has that affected your planning at this stage? So nuclear is actually one of the only forms of electricity generation which has to plan and include within the electricity price the cost of planning what you do at the other end of the life of the power station. So science will see will operate for at least 60 years, maybe 80, maybe even 100. But at some point, it will have to be decommissioned. So before we start building, we create a detailed plan for how we decommission it, how we take it apart.

22:18And we have a detailed plan for what happens with the waste. So nuclear waste is always one of those elephant in the room questions, where people can often get to the point of agreeing that nuclear is a jolly good thing, but then they'll say, but what about the waste? So but what about the waste? It's very small in volume. So if you personally had your life times electricity coming from nuclear, then you would use an amount of uranium which would fit inside a Coke can. And that's the same uranium, which is in waste having been irradiated at the other end. So it's volumetrically small. And what happens with the waste from a new nuclear power station like Sideswell C is that it's cooled down for some months in a cooling pond, but then it's encased in concrete canisters and they sit completely safely and inert.

23:04So you can hug the canisters if you're so inclined. I think some people who've been to see them have even licked them. And they sit in what's called a dry waste store. And that is on the site. And you can see one in action if you visit Sizewell B or if people want to just Google Sizewell B dry waste store, you can see what this looks like. And it's extremely safe. There's a safety case to keep waste there for at least 100 years. If it were desired to reconcrete and keep the waste in the same place for more hundreds of years, that would be fine. It is volumetrically very small. It's sitting inside either a large shed or a small warehouse, depending on your shed warehouse definitions.

23:47And I think in lots of ways, it's very calming. I think people have images of nuclear waste, which are probably derived from the Simpsons, but it really isn't like that. And it's also, I think, very educative when you go into the dry waste store, you can see what is the downside of nuclear. You can see it's small. So you can see that in this canister is the fuel now irradiated and safely contained in the concrete, which is in the case of size world B, given the nation 3 % of its electricity for a period of time, probably 18 months or so. And I think that's a really useful thing for people to see.

24:30And then new nuclear reactors are designed to be decommissioned. So a lot of the public anxiety about decommissioning comes from Sellafield and the fact that that's extremely expensive. But that is in many ways because Sellafield is the result of a developing industry, both military and civil in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. it's not really related to what happens with a new nuclear power station. So with a new nuclear power station, everything's pre-labeled. It's designed to be decommissioned. And you can actually take the fuel out of a new nuclear reactor inside days rather than years. And then you decommission the whole thing within around about 15 years.

25:15And there are plenty of examples around the world. And there are some, for example, in the US where you can see the time lapse So if you've got a new nuclear power station, then you've got a green site about 15 years later. So it's a task rather than a problem. And it's a well-understood task. When it's such a long-term project as well, do you almost have to take yourself out of the equation a little bit and think, if I'm not here for the full lifespan of the project, how am I sort of sharing information with other people? Yeah, you absolutely have to think that. I mean, however optimistic I am, I'm not going to be alive in 100 years.

25:49So succession, rebuilding the industry after a long period of no new nuclear is very much on our minds. Succession is very much on our minds. And actually, to our earlier conversation, it's one of the reasons why we need to make sure we have a workforce which, roughly speaking, mirrors society. This has got to be a resilient model and it's got to be attractive to people to come into it. I really care about changing people's preconceptions about nuclear because it is a great industry for people to work in and a really great employer. It's an industry which really cares about developing people. And I think more people should look at it and come into it because it's going to be around a long time.

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