The combined civil and defence nuclear sector grew from 83,000 people in 2023 to over 100,000 in 2025, according to early indications from the latest Nuclear Workforce Assessment set out in the annual update to Parliament published this week.
Within that, the Defence Nuclear Enterprise employs over 47,000, with demand expected to grow to around 65,000 by 2030. Organisations signed up to the Nuclear Skills Plan have recruited over 2,000 graduates and over 4,000 apprentices in the first two years of its operation, of whom around 1,300 graduates and around 3,100 apprentices were in defence nuclear.
A joint investment by the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will create over 500 PhD positions across eight years, with the first starting this autumn, which the update says will help develop a new generation of experts to push the boundaries of nuclear science.
Eight indirect intervention contracts are being mobilised to support mid-career switchers, improve cross-sector mobility, address regional challenges and work with training providers to ensure supply matches employer demand.
The plan was published by the Nuclear Skills Taskforce in May 2024 and is led jointly by the two departments, backed by government and industry investment including from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce Submarines, Babcock and EDF.
The update describes the approach as recognising that a collaborative effort bringing together government, industry and academia from across the civil and defence nuclear sectors is essential to meet future skills needs.
Workforce growth at Barrow-in-Furness has been particularly marked, with the update recording that the workforce there has grown by over 1,800 under the current government. BAE Systems’ Barrow shipyard is described as the only facility in the United Kingdom with the infrastructure, site licence and resources to design and build British nuclear submarines.
BAE Systems, the Defence Nuclear Organisation, Babcock and Rolls-Royce Submarines all maintain teams at Barrow, contributing to the Dreadnought and Astute build programmes and the future SSN-AUKUS programme.
Wes Streeting writes that delivery of the Nuclear Skills Plan is “breaking down barriers to opportunity by bringing highly skilled nuclear jobs to regions that have historically faced challenges”.
Why have you used an AI generated photo for the article….?
It’s a representation of the famous Astute in-build photo but with SSN-AUKUS.
We three Kings…
BAE publicity image; _SkPRc9.png from WAY back in December 2013.
Pretty sure those are ALL Astutes.
HMS Artful on the left.
HMS Anson in the centre … aka “Smiley McSmilely Face Anson.”
HMS Audacious on the right.
“Anson Forward End Construction (FEC)” “The forward end construction of the fifth Astute class submarine, Anson, lining up alongside her sisters, Artful and Audacious”.
WTF has this got to do with NET ZERO madness???
Because that’s what they added onto Department for Energy Security name.
And anyway, nuclear energy is much cleaner than any other energy sources, with barely any GhG emission…
Greenhouse gases do not warm the planet mate
Someone tell that to Venus…
Brilliant comment just splurted my beer all over the pub
Colin Brooks, science master 🤣😂
I’m hoping you’re a bot mate because any human that can make a statement like that has no business writing here.
Even the most strenuous climate change deniers know that gas produces a warming effect. It’s the reason that life can exist on earth. If there was no greenhouse gas effect earth would be frozen solid.
Almost right but no cigar Jim. CO2 is what makes life on earth possible.
Plants feed on CO2, much of animal life eat plants we eat plants and we eat the animals that eat the plants, nice arrangement. ^.^
You know what else is necessary for most life on the planet? Oxygen.
You know what’d happen if you let a human inhale 100% oxygen for an extended period? They’d die.
Something can be both necessary in the correct amount, and lethal in the incorrect amount.
Greenhouse gases are like that. Good in moderation, really not good if you have too many. Again, take a look at Venus.
All our oxygen has come from CO2, plants take in CO2, store the carbon and release oxygen. The last time I read up on it the paleo-climate bods believe that Earth began with an atmosphere of CO2 and Nitrogen. Once life proliferated the CO2 levels fell because (as above) life consumes CO2. Now we have idiots who wish to reduce atmospheric CO2 to zero %.
I think you may have misunderstood. Nobody wants to reduce atmospheric CO2 to zero %, just to stop it increasing, as it has done rapidly over the past hundred years.
Sorry but you are wrong Nathan, our politicians and their hangers on attend the (annual?) bean feast climate Conference and talk ‘for the UK’. Successive prime ministers plus our royal right charlie attend and have said exactly that.
I don’t think that you understand what “greenhouse gas” means in the context of heat retention on a planetary surface.
Yes they do Colin. They reflect heat (energy) which would otherwise disappear into space back to the earth. Too much and the planet warms – too little and it gets too cold. We need it just right to maintain an ideal temperature.
That is one theory, there are many. There is no scientist,university or research organisation that understands how the climate works. However there are some facts and I deal with those. theories can be tested (by experiment or by observation in the real world)
Actually that one is easy to prove and has been universally accepted by scientists around the world. Anyone can replicate it using a greenhouse.
There are arguments that the earth might be able to adjust the temperature periodically using a number of mechanisms. Problem is many of those are likely to eliminate humanity in the process.
Humans should be clever enough to adjust the climate and to balance the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is difficult but not that difficult. The tricky part is avoiding certain countries from panicking and thinking they would be severely disadvantaged which is not necessarily the case.
Mark you really do not have any knowledge at all do you, statements that you make have no basis in fact at all:
universally accepted by scientists around the world……. proof please
Anyone can replicate it using a greenhouse…… describe how you would do that please
Humans should be clever enough to adjust the climate…… humans are not clever enough to adjust the climate thank god otherwise they would already have removed all CO2 from the atmosphere as above.
Are you familiar with milankovitch cycles? How does that fit with your ideas??
What about cosmic radiation changing the climate tested in the Hadron collider and found to be possible?
Alas you will have to do better than that Colin. Climate science has been the biggest topic since WW2. There has been debate upon debate and all scientists attempting to prove things one way or another. The mass consensus amongst scientists is borne out by the evidence in temperature rises since the industrial revolution. Go read it for yourself. I am not rerunning that debate on a defence site for no benefit. I total get that there are some, probably including you, who deny the whole thing. That is fine there are probably still some people who believe the world is flat. That is fine by me.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is being done but obviously needs significant quantities of energy which humans are working on.
Milankovitch cycles. Yes I am aware. Not at all surprised that a planet such as this should have atmospheric cycles. We can see a lot of that through ice cores etc. However this global warming has happened over the last 2-3 hundred years not thousand of years. I am not a great believer in coincidence.
There are many possible explanations but you do not appear to accept the most obvious or even accept that it might be a possibility. That is something only you can answer.
There are I’m sure other sites to debate this with others however whilst it interests me I accept I am on a defence site here and will get back to some of the newer articles. Good chatting Colin.
Actually chatting to someone like you is not fun Mark, I prefer people who know what they are talking about ^.^
It’s cleaner, it’s just so expensive.
Not if you do it en masse.
Using nuclear as a novelty side portion of our energy mix is what makes it so incredibly expensive.
And of course you have factored in the decommissioning, right?
Everything that touches nuclear becomes contaminated, which then has to be dealt with which produces more contamination… Those oh safe reactors in the circa 19 boats that are tied up alongside -surely, if the reactors were so safe it would be quite easy to take them out and store them and then purpose the rest of the content in the boat; erm, perhaps not.
The decommissioning, too, would be made a lot cheaper per GW by expanding Nuclear into more of our power generation.
You have displayed erudition in other replies, sadly, this reply is lacking.
Creating anything contaminated just means further contamination.
Then the nimbys kick in – working people in Millom either work at DDH or Sellafield.
Will they accept a low level repository for waste, no.
Go figure.
“Code Red! … Nurse! … Oh, Nurse! … Colin read a word and panicked and has accidentally diagnosed himself with Net Zero madness.” Now, he’s having a myocardial infarction in aisle 5. Prepare to load 200mg of reading comprehension and two Snicker Bars into Torpedo Tube Number 1.”
… re-read the job title and calm down 🐯🤠🧁👸.
Well Colin you raised it but nuclear science is very much overlapping with reducing carbon emissions. One might think as we are talking about apprenticeships, education and investment for the future, to further develop knowledge and capability in this wide ranging technology over the next generation, that understanding, exploring and studying how best to exploit it to the maximum to reduce damage to the planet might be sensible, especially as it might actually benefit the economy heading into the future over the lifetime of this skill generation. Sticking one’s head in the sand or tilting at windmills like Trump only leads to Britain once again missing out on exploiting potentially productive technology (often that which we invented) that by not doing so could damage our economy. Too often we invented things we don’t recognise the economic and societal potential for, blue lasers anyone. Plenty of people thought the aeroplane a useless technology like Ferdinand Foch for example who we might remember was not only a top military man of course but was also a member of the French Academy of Sciences, so might have equally been expected to seen overlapping visions of scientific advancement too. How anyone, particularly after this Summer, can’t see overlapping cause and effects is beyond me, one being imminent food shortages that no doubt the same people will whinge about, but either way to fail to explore such potential overlaps is simply a lack of lateral thinking that so damages the economy and society alike. Is that not plain and obvious?