Private company set up to oversee UK's prototype fusion reactor The UK government has set up a delivery body tasked with building a prototype fusion energy plant to be sited at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Announced today by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the newly established UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd (UKIFS) will have responsibility for …
£20bn over 20 years doesn't buy you that many staff, in the grand scheme. Assuming the all up cost to hire and equip a mid level professional is at £100k/yr, that's approx 10,000 staff for 20 years.
Hinkley point apparently has about 6300 staff working on it, so assuming the project is of similar size; £20bn doesn't leave much for capex and R&D.
Quite where these people are coming from to work on pie-in-the-sky projects when there are desperate shortages in projects needed now, I'm open to suggestions.
As one gets older the cynicism goes up. As much as the scientist would like me to see this fly, the pragmatist says Pork Barrel Fund.
Ho hum!
... actually finding people with necessary skills. No doubt the minister has a cunning plan…
China, India and Pakistan probably have quite a lot. But it seems a long-term project. Many years ago, I got to go on an open-day to a nuclear power plant. This both amazed and disappointed me. I saw the control room with indicators showing the core temperature. They didn't read thousands of degrees. How disappointing. But the guide was great, explained lots, and I considered a future career in nuclear science or engineering. Then of course we abandoned most of it, rather limiting future career opportunities. So I did a different engineering degree instead.
Which is I think still the problem. The government wibbles muchly about STEM, and there's probably even an app for it. But physics is kinda hard, especially if career options are still limited. So I think we really need a feeder scheme to prepare future nuclear physicists. Which would seem a relatively low-cost option, ie dangle a bunch of bursaries offering free degrees of freedom, and in a decade or two, we'll hopefully have a bunch of people trained up to do this kind of research and work. Otherwise they'll just have to be imported from countries that seem to value education more than we do, or our best and brightest will be tempted to go work overseas.
Looks like there is a skills gap in the animation sector - where will they get the promo videos of fusion happening made?
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/feb/06/aardman-uk-animators-may-have-to-move-abroad
The government wibbles muchly about STEM, and there's probably even an app for it. But physics is kinda hard, especially if career options are still limited
If you're bright enough to be a physicist then there are much more lucrative jobs in finance available. Most of which won't get the planet out of its climate predicament or make better cancer treatments etc. though...
Hence the long standard argument over companies not paying STEM people doing STEM jobs considerably better than financiers; which is a bit of a myth tbh other than at the highest levels.
Like most Physics grads of the 90's I went into banking too. High 5 to 6 fig jobs are pretty rare in reality, and most stuff is humdrum office or call centre BS. The bank wasn't a bad employer to get some "corporate" experience on CV; and a bunch of training.
It put me in a decent place to jump into the engineering sector where I've been ever since. Considerably better pay than all but the "investment" banking nonsense. Had I gone direct entry into engineering the CV probably wouldn't have got through the shit filter.
The final irony of course is that progressing a career in engineering inevitably means becoming a money man anyway.
A/C because someone motivated could probably figure out who I am from this text if you really wanted to.
Hence the long standard argument over companies not paying STEM people doing STEM jobs considerably better than financiers; which is a bit of a myth tbh other than at the highest levels.
I think that's a wider problem of paying people what they're worth, not necessarily what they think they're worth. There's also a danger of generalisation, eg a quant who devises a trading strategy that generates billions from shuffling bits around is arguably worth more than a quant that can't quantify the quanta of energy absorbed and re-radiated by a simple molecule like CO2. Or worse, costs society billions by distorting those quantities.
Or there are all the scientists doing science that may never have any practical application. Or sometimes it's just nobody has come along and realised that that research could actually have tremendous value. Or it just allows me to stumble across something I didn't know, go 'huh!', and feel pleased about having learned something new. Hard to quantify the value of that, but I like learning new things, and science is supposed to be about advancing human knowledge.
In business, that's more of a luxury, and it's usually easier to quantify the value someone brings to a company. There are standard methodologies to apply P&L to individuals, decide if they're a cost or profit centre and manage those numbers. Often that's done badly, but hey, it's IT and we know how that works. In politics, I guess it gets more complicated because politics. So figuring out where to allocate funds across all possible research areas. Which then also gets political, ie all the money still being poured into climate research despite continually being told that science has long been settled. Or some of that spending is still a good thing, because the more we understand our weather, the better it is for our economy. So public money should shift towards adaptation and mitigation. We can always benefit from cheap, reliable energy, and fission & fusion promise this.
But then it's also the other bits of STEM. Like another person pointed out. To make these fantastic gadgets, we also need engineers who can translate theory into reality, and build stuff that can be adjusted with a precision hammer. Yet we've been busily de-industrialising and not developing that skill base either. Or losing it as industrys shut down, off-shore, engineers retire or leave industry and aren't replaced. Then we may figure out how to build Mr. Fusion, but can't build it. Kind of why I still want to create a machinist's school for makers of things, but I just can't make the numbers work.
"Then we may figure out how to build Mr. Fusion, but can't build it."
That's much like the story behind the e-ink display. It was developed in the US, but no company in the US could mass produce it as the whole of the display business moved to Asia.
Politicians don't seem to understand that designing a product only generates a tiny little bit of GDP where stamping that widget out by the millions generates a whole bunch. It's also important to not put a barrier between the designers and the people that make the product. I'm very hands-on and when I got my own mill and lathe, my mechanical designs got a whole lot better. I could think about how parts would be produced using common tools. It's the "design for manufacturability" mantra that schools sometimes try to teach, but one gets in tune with it better when they have to stand at the machine and make the part. 3D printing is fine (there's one just to my right in the office) but it's not a particularly fast process and has limited material choices.
I also doubt that many of the construction workers at Hinckley C are working in an office block. They might have a portacabin to eat their packed lunch in when it's raining. They will be on contributory pensions (probably with a matched 3% contribution), and you don't need much IT infrastructure to our concrete. I don't know where you're getting £60k from, either. The average salary for a construction worker in the UK is apparently £47.5k, and I would suspect that this is the median and not the mean, and many of the workers at Hinckley are on way less than that.
Binraider is correct. The cost to employee somebody is much more than their salary. There's tax contributions from the employer, liability insurance, covering screw-ups that lead to wasted time and materials, coffee, PPE, pension contributions, education allowances, holiday pay, blah blah. There is also an HR cost to make sure that each employee is being treated properly and maintains any needed certifications along with training for additional certifications they might need or are desirable for the company so there is overlap. It does add up and can be anywhere from 20% of salary and up. If there is much turnover, there is a cost to attract, hire and train replacements. Most new employees aren't worth in useful work what they are being paid for a period of time until they are up to speed. This is why a high turnover rate is a bad indicator for a company's profitability. Hell, there is a cost to process the payroll.
The skills gap is bigger than you think.
Many of the old pharts like me were involved in a bigger or smaller way with the JET project, we made the bits that assembled into the torus.. complete with high accuracy demanded by the scientists
Sadly a lot of the older pharts have now retired...... I'm 6 yrs away give or take a couple of months. and do we have the skills needed to make the parts for the project.?.. doubt it.... anyone sane with the skills needed ends up in Formula one manufacture or aerospace
Having the guys able to design the thing in one hurdle... having the people like me to build it is another
And those capable of either thing dont go into a messy dead end job that pays badly when they can sit in an office in a bank and make a shed load more cash.
.. anyone sane with the skills needed ends up in Formula one manufacture or aerospace
Get the F1 teams to replace their IC engines with an electric motor, powered by a miniature fusion reactor.
Take domestic fridge sized fusion reactor that Boris (Johnson) said was almost ready, miniaturise it to the size of the drinks fridge that was used for the parties during lockdown at No. 10 - that lot should fit nicely at the back.
Simple!
@Binraider
It's not fair to compare a small experimental project to Hinkley point C which is a massive project with 2 reactors.
Also the reactors (producing the hot steam) are only about 50% of a power plant were the rest is about generating the electricity and taking care of the heat.
And it cannot be compared to ITER either.
It's more about brainpower and time than manpower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Note: the project is of comparable scale, not the anticipated results.
In other words, they expect to spend as much on the project planning (which is all this is) as on the project planning for Hinckley C, the UK's largest building site.
That's a lot of money for a bunch of project managers somewhere. I wonder how much of it they'll donate back to the Tory party?
Well yeah, it has the advantage that "commercial sensitivity" makes it harder to work out whose pockets the money is being diverted into. And if by some miracle it does produce worthwhile results, it can be more easily sold to the Americans for significant personal profit and huge loss to the country, and politically-connected middle-men can licence it to be sold at enormous profit to the people who paid for its funding in the first place. meh.
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