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On January 27 in Brussels, the European Industrial Alliance on Small Modular Reactors (SMR) gathered policymakers, regulators, industry, academia and civil society for its first SMR Stakeholders’ Forum. In this setting, I2EN was invited to speak on how Europe can build the workforce, public trust and knowledge management systems needed to turn Small Modular Reactors and Advanced Modular Reactor concepts into a competitive industrial reality by the early 2030s.
The Alliance, created in 2024, now has more than 320 members and a Strategic Action Plan for 2025-2029 that explicitly links SMR deployment to manufacturing capacity, robust supply chains and skills development. The Brussels Forum tested Europe’s readiness: it examined SMRs’ role in the Clean Industrial Deal, their use for industrial heat and hydrogen, and the safety, waste and socio-political implications of bringing nuclear closer to factories and communities.
For I2EN, one message was straightforward: Europe’s SMR strategy will stand or fall on its human infrastructure. Over the next decade, the nuclear sector must recruit hundreds of thousands of people across Europe, while preserving legacy know-how, creating new cross-sectoral profiles for SMR industry integration and maintaining public confidence as nuclear enters new environments. Workforce planning, public acceptance and knowledge management are therefore enabling conditions for the SMR and Advanced Modular Reactor market, not side issues.
The SMR workforce paradox: fewer workers, new skills
Small modular reactors promise factory fabrication, modular construction and shorter schedules. This shift can cut on-site construction labour by a factor of 2-3 compared with traditional gigawatt-scale projects, but it also creates a paradox: fewer workers are needed on site, yet they require skills that current training systems largely do not provide.
For SMRs, factory-based construction demands precision welders trained to aerospace-grade tolerances, digital manufacturing specialists, module assembly technicians and quality inspectors familiar with both nuclear codes and advanced automation. The most disruptive workforce issue highlighted in Brussels concerns integration with industrial users. While grid-connected electricity still dominates nuclear applications, industrial process heat is the fastest-growing SMR segment as energy-intensive sectors decarbonise ceramics, chemicals, refining and hydrogen.
Heat economics and physics drive proximity. For district heating at 80 – 130 °C, pipelines beyond 20-30 km quickly become uneconomic; for high-temperature industrial processes (400 – 950 °C, and even up to 1,600 °C for the ceramics industry), including thermochemical hydrogen production, practical coupling distances are typically below 1 km. This means SMRs for industrial heat will be located on or very near industrial sites, embedding nuclear safety culture into existing plants and workforces rather than operating at arm’s length. In such settings, training “traditional” profiles in parallel is not enough. Nuclear operators must understand customer processes, industrial engineers must gain nuclear literacy, and both communities must share a compatible safety culture. As framed by I2EN: “We’re training nuclear operators and industrial specialists, but nobody is training the Systems Integration Engineers managing the hand-off between them.”
Three priorities follow: targeted nuclear fundamentals for industrial engineers; practical understanding of industrial processes for SMR operators; and joint safety culture training that reconciles nuclear conservatism with industrial productivity imperatives. Current curricula rarely produce these cross-functional “translators”. A coordination platform like I2EN might help redesign programmes across institutions.
Managing renewal and innovation at once
Europe’s nuclear workforce is ageing. Many experts who participated in the construction boom are now nearing retirement, raising the risk that tacit knowledge accumulated through decades of operation and maintenance will be lost. At the same time, Europe’s nuclear ambitions, including around 150 GW of nuclear capacity with 50 GW of SMRs by 2050, require a sharp increase in skilled personnel. And SMRs often add innovation: they deploy new technologies (e.g., advanced fuels, passive safety, new materials, modular construction, where no long operational history exists. Traditional apprenticeship-based knowledge transfer is too slow relative to deployment schedules.
International experience shows that effective knowledge management combines documentation with structured practices: mentoring schemes, scenario-based debriefings, digital platforms for experience feedback, and organised “knowledge capture” before retirements. For SMRs and AMRs, such mechanisms need to be built into national strategies and project plans from the outset. I2EN’s work with nuclear newcomer countries, where it helps to develop the human capacity skills with specific training modules provided by the French infrastructure. This offers a model for embedding knowledge management in SMR programmes.
Cross-border standards and demand-driven training
As coordinator of France’s nuclear education and training ecosystem, bringing together around 30 universities, engineering schools, research labs and industrial partners, I2EN is well placed to act as a bridge between European policy ambitions and concrete training and knowledge solutions. Its mandate covers quality standards (through the I2EN Label), holistic training needs assessments and serving as an entry point to French nuclear education and training for international partners.
Industrial heat users have specific temperature needs, operating cycles and safety cultures. If they are not involved in course design, SMR operators and industrial staff will not be ready for real-world coupling. This requires a demand-driven approach to SMRs through end-user advisory groups (the French Industrial Nuward Advisory Board, INAB is an interesting example), targeted courses and joint simulation exercises. As I2EN puts it: “SMR innovation must be demand-driven, not just supply-pushed-and that starts with understanding what industrial heat users actually need.”
So, what did we learn?
Europe’s ambition for nuclear deployment, i.e.,150 GW by 2050 (where among 50 GW SMRs), is likely achievable technologically and financially, but will require on the order of 225,000 additional nuclear professionals over the next decade, including profiles specific to SMRs and Advanced Modular Reactors.
SMRs reduce on-site labour but demand new skills (factory manufacturing specialists, digital integrators and cross-sector “interface engineers”) that current education and training structures barely address. Furthermore, cross-border quality standards and mutual recognition of SMR-related competencies are essential so that skills can move with projects across the single market.
I2EN and its network of members and partners are positioned to support Europe with meeting these challenges by setting and labelling quality standards, aligning study and training programmes with industrial needs and supporting the SMR Alliance in making workforce, public acceptance and knowledge management a central pillar of the European SMR strategy.