Maintaining Technical Talent within the NNL

The overall skill base within the nuclear industry has declined significantly over the last decade and a large proportion of the existing research and development expertise now resides within Nexia Solutions. It is imperative to ensure further skills degradation is minimised and over time skills to support the industry gradually enhanced through appropriate strategies between government, industry and academia. Within Nexia Solutions we have a key driver to develop and maintain a skills pipeline into industry, enabling enhanced future competition and as a result deliver further value for money. To this end we have developed programmes to maintain the technical talent within our organisation, while enabling skills transfer into industry. This presentation concentrates on the overall topic of maintaining technical talent to underpin current and future nuclear programmes. Integral to this is the identification of key skills and expertise, the development and maintainence of university links including University Research Alliences (URA's), the integration into EPSRC and other research programmes, the development and implemention of bespoke training, and enabling key links into other National Labs and industry partners internationally.

Fiona Rayment is a chartered chemist with a BSc (Honours) and a PhD in Chemistry and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is Technical Authority within Nexia Solutions for the areas of Environment, Effluents and Disposal. She has over fifteen years experience in the nuclear industry, working primarily within technology, operations and strategic planning roles across a number of different nuclear sites both in the UK and abroad. These roles include a number of technical strategies roles in support of decommissioning and clean up operations, immobilisation of intermediate level wastes, effluent treatment and waste disposal. She has led a number of R&D programmes in support of waste retrieval, decommissioning and remediation operations. Fiona is also Head of Technology within Nexia Solutions and has the responsibility for the technical work undertaken by approximately 100 scientists and engineers.