INTERNATIONAL. British utilities risk falling behind with plans to build nuclear power plants because Gulf nations may use higher salaries to lure skilled workers, reactor builder Westinghouse Electric Co said.

“These nations have no legacy program to use as a source for nuclear expertise,” said Adrian Bull, UK stakeholder relations manager at Westinghouse, a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp. “If you have literally nothing to go on, you have to be the Chelsea or Real Madrid and buy in the people from elsewhere.”

Oil-producing nations including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait plan nuclear plants to meet growing energy demand at home while exporting fuel abroad. The UAE plans to select companies to develop an atomic power program by the end of this year and has a 2017 target date for completing its first reactor, the same year Electricite de France plans to start a new British nuclear plant.

Nuclear power is undergoing a revival worldwide as governments look to limit dependence on fossil fuel and curb greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly 70 countries have expressed an interest in developing nuclear power programs, according to the IAEA. That will increase demands on the limited pool of nuclear engineers and technicians from countries already operating reactors.

“Globally you have this shortage of talent in the nuclear area,” Iain Manson, head of energy and utilities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for recruitment company Korn/Ferry International, said in a phone interview.

“Everyone is moving to new nuclear build. Those parts of the world that move quicker will get the talent.”

Spanish football club Real Madrid last week agreed to pay a world record US$132 million for Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo, last year’s World Player of the Year.

In the UAE capital Abu Dhabi, “they are recruiting from all over including the UK,” Manson said. US President Barack Obama recommended on 20 May that Congress approve an agreement to help the UAE start an atomic energy programme.

Padraic Riley, a spokesman for the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp, which will run the UAE's nuclear programme, reiterated the country’s 2017 goal for new nuclear plants in a phone interview today. He declined to comment on recruitment.

“Some of the Middle East countries are building up the regulatory structures and all the things they need” for building new plants, according to Bull, who chairs a group for the UK National Skills Academy for Nuclear. So far the hiring is in “relatively small numbers,” he said.

If the pace grows, “we stand to be embarrassed” in the UK by recruiting too few workers, Bull said. “We need to be planning some overcapacity in our training programmes to allow for the fact that people may go and not come back, or may go without people coming the other way.”

EDF, the world’s biggest operator of nuclear plants, plans to build four reactors in the UK with a capacity of 1,650 megawatts each after buying British Energy Group in January for £12.5 billion. It said in December the cost of building a similar model at Flamanville in France had climbed by about a fifth to about US$5.6 billion.

E.ON and RWE, Germany’s two biggest utilities, have a venture to build reactors in Britain with 6,000 megawatts capacity. Iberdrola, GDF Suez and Scottish & Southern Energy have a rival group seeking sites for new reactors. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown endorses the technology to replace older plants without adding to carbon-dioxide emissions.

There are “wonderful opportunities” for job-creation in the UK through promoting low-carbon technologies including nuclear power, as well as renewable energy and carbon capture and storage plants, Phil Hunt, the British energy minister, said in an interview last week.

Government education programmes that focus on science, technology and engineering are designed to “open up the vistas for young people,” Hunt said. “A lot of our focus will be ensuring that we can help people get the skills in which we can drive forward the low-carbon economy.”

Hunt estimated 880,000 people already work in environmental and low-carbon businesses in the UK and pledged to work with companies to help that to expand.

“What better example of contributing to the low-carbon economy?” he said about nuclear power. There’s “lots of investment, high-quality jobs, high-quality skills, British know-how.”

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