I am about to finish my first Nucleargraduates 8 month secondment. This seems a good time to reflect on my time in West Cumbria and on my first 8 months on the Nucleargraduates scheme, where my work has been focused on decommissioning.
DZ1
It all started back in September with the Nucleargraduates Cohort 3 ‘development training zone 1’ in a walkers hostel at Wast Water Lake. This was a busy couple of weeks where a company called Zense gave us a range of training including an overview of the industry, self awareness exercises, team building activities planning goals for our secondments and many other things. Wast Water is a fairly remote location, with no phone or TV signal so this gave the 7 members of our cohort the perfect chance to really get to know each other, as well as the area. We had only previously met during one welcome weekend (apart from at assessment centres in some cases) which was also the first time in Cumbria for most of us.
Welcome Weekend- Go Ape
For my first 6 months I worked in an off site Sellafield Ltd design office in a project team that is designing and procuring equipment to decommission one of Sellafield’s legacy buildings. As my first degree is in Electrical Engineering I was placed in the control electrical and instrumentation (CE&I) team. I was surprised to learn the amount of new construction that goes into the decommissioning of legacy facilities. When you think of decommissioning you think about taking things apart and knocking them down. In reality, before this can take place, new equipment and infrastructure needs to be produced that can safely retrieve and store the radioactive waste contained within the building and this can be an extremely complex and challenging process.
I undertook a wide range of general CE&I work during the placement including; planning cable routes and interfaces; checking electrical drawings of equipment; and investigating the best new components for refurbishing old equipment that is being reused for decommissioning operations. I learned a great deal from the many experienced CE&I engineers who I carried out this work with. I also learned about the type of challenges that face multidisciplinary teams. The best solution to a given problem from a CE&I perspective is rarely the best for another discipline and therefore adequate compromises must be found. An example of this was that easiest cable route and best cableguration would often place an unacceptable load on the building from a civil structural and architectural (CS&A) perspective.
As well as this I was responsible for developing a strategy for ensuring that new equipment conforms to all relevant European directives and can therefore be CE marked. This involved talking to engineers from all backgrounds, working on all parts of the project. This was a great way to learn what was going on across the project and gave me the chance to become the resident ‘expert’ on CE marking. This meant I could help the people out who I had been relying on to help me with other work, when they had questions to do with CE marking.
The last couple of months I have been working in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) strategy team. This has been a very different type of work to the previous design office type work. It has given me a much greater understanding of what is going on across all the NDA sites and projects and has shown me how the work I was involved in for Sellafield fits into the wider decommissioning mission.
For my footprints work I have been acting as a science technology engineering and maths (STEM) ambassador in local schools. This work has included helping out with after school science clubs at primary schools. Some of the activities the children carried out here included making bridges, wind up toys and kites. I went in to some science lessons to help explain where the principles children were learning about were used in the real world and tell them about what it is like to work in science and engineering. This included answering a wide range of questions about electricity, from where it come from to how fast it travels. I helped with several day long events run by Cumbria STEM centre. One of these involved telling sixth formers about studying engineering at University another involved teaching school children about programming robots. A couple of times I was helped out by a robot called Oscar, who was built to speak to children at such events. Oscar is unfortunately sometimes distracted by attractive water machines, and asked me to build him a girlfriend in front of a couple of schools.
Oscar
Next up for me is 8 months focused on Defence, when I am due to be moving between the MOD and Rolls Royce in Barrow in Furness and Caithness respectively. It is exciting to be moving on to new things but also a bit sad, as we are all fairly settled in a couple of rented houses between all of our cohort, and we will all be spread across the country in a few weeks. Oh well bring on Training zone 2, in an as yet unknown (possibly) top secret location!
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