An exodus of nuclear engineers ?

February 16, 2012

South Korea headhunting top TEPCO nuclear engineers

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20120216p2a00m0na012000c.html

South Korea has been trying to hire top nuclear experts from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) in the wake of the meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

South Korea is looking to expand its nuclear power program, and in the summer of 2011 -- about six months after the outbreak of the nuclear disaster -- a top engineer at TEPCO's nuclear power division was invited to dinner by a South Korean government official. The South Korean official asked the engineer, "How much of your salary has been cut?" and "Are you satisfied with your working conditions?" and sounded him out about joining South Korea's state-run power company, according to a TEPCO official close to the engineer.

At about the same time, another TEPCO employee was asked by a South Korean government official to have a meeting. When he met the South Korean, he was offered a job. "Please help us!" the South Korean government official was quoted as telling him. It is not clear what kind of job he was offered.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the two TEPCO employees turned down the job offers. "They are still working at the nuclear power division," a senior TEPCO official said. The two cases point to South Korea's drive to headhunt Japanese nuclear engineers expert in nuclear power plants designed and built by Japanese companies such as Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.

The recruiting drive would not be the first coming from South Korea, as in the early 1990s Samsung Electronics began headhunting engineers from top Japanese firms such as Sony and Panasonic to boost the company's technological capabilities. Samsung is now the world's top electronics maker.

Regarding recent attempts to snap up Japanese nuclear engineers, a senior TEPCO official said, "TEPCO has become a headhunting ground for those from abroad and at home."

Employee turnover at TEPCO has been high since the outbreak of the Fukushima nuclear crisis as its business performance deteriorates, while the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has also settled on policies to reduce reliance on nuclear power and split up the utility. According to internal TEPCO documents, excluding mandatory retirees about 300 people have left the utility since the outbreak of the crisis -- more than three times the usual rate -- and 200-300 people are believed to be preparing to leave the company by the end of the business year.

The exodus has been led mainly by young engineers and "elite" staff, many of whom have moved to trading houses, major food companies and international financial institutions. There are no confirmed cases of a TEPCO employee joining an overseas nuclear energy related firm, but it has not been possible to trace where all the former employees got their next jobs.

About 30 percent of South Korea's energy output is nuclear. The South Korean government approved a plan in December to build two nuclear reactors in Uljin, in the east of the country, and President Lee Myung-bak vowed to promote nuclear power policy, saying, "Our country is an importer of energy. We will continue to have nuclear power."

Lee visited Turkey and held talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Feb. 5. At the meeting, the two countries agreed to resume suspended negotiations on building nuclear power plants in Turkey. Japan suspended nuclear plant contract talks with Ankara after the Fukushima meltdowns, and South Korea appears to be trying to turn the tables on Japanese nuclear plant builders with offers of reactors of its own.

Following the outbreak of the Fukushima crisis, Germany, Italy and Switzerland declared an end to further nuclear plant construction. On the other hand, the United States, China and emerging economies in Southeast Asia have been moving ahead to build more nuclear reactors. China has reportedly launched a hiring offensive for German nuclear engineers, highlighting the increasingly hot cross-border competition for these experts.

The outflow of nuclear technologies could threaten global nuclear security measures to block proliferation of nuclear weapons. TEPCO operates "pluthermal" nuclear reactors burning so-called MOX fuel, made up of mixed oxides of uranium, and plutonium -- a fissile material used in nuclear bombs. A senior official of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy said TEPCO's technologies for handling plutonium are also "capable of making nuclear weapons."

One of the members of the House of Representatives Committee on National Security said, "TEPCO's technologies are objects of envy for countries promoting nuclear power. It would be a security problem if TEPCO's human resources and technologies were to flow out of Japan."

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