EASL at NUPP 2017

POSTED 13.02.17

Over the course of 2017, EASL will be attending a number of engineering conferences across the country, either as exhibitors, delegates or presenting papers and talks. The first of these was our part in ASRANet’s NUPP conference in London.

Here, Dr Rob Wang and Dr Brahim Nadri both presented papers based on EASL’s expertise in the nuclear industry, with Antony Hurst also attending the event.

Antony’s thoughts

With each conference we will collect EASL’s thoughts and experiences as part of our news section, starting with Managing Director Antony Hurst’s take on the Nuclear Power Plant Conference that took place in Croydon, London, UK.

“Whilst I hadn’t produced a paper for the event, I joined Rob and Brahim for the conference taking the opportunity to engage in and explore structural integrity within the nuclear industry amongst other organisations and individuals.

With around 50 to 70 delegates at the conference, attendance was dominated by younger engineers and scientists, with a dozen or so very experienced practitioners presenting their expertise.

NUPP 2017 saw a broad range of speakers on a truly global level – with speakers from UK, Russia, China, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Finland, USA, Canada, Korea and Taiwan.

The mix and intimate nature allowed for more time to be taken with each presentation, and greater opportunities to speak face to face with many of the delegates over the 3 days.

A lot of the papers presented were based on PhD research.  This led to more of a focus on the academic nature of structural integrity within Nuclear, rather than a strong industry focus of value and application. However, a clear area emerged in the talks that saw many papers looking at the application of complex FEA of infrequent or very infrequent hazards (seismic or aircraft impact) with an aim to reduce pessimism.

With the disaster at Fukushima in 2011 still making headlines, its effect on the industry is still being felt as we seek to restore confidence in this clean energy source. As such, it felt from the large variety of papers presented there was a major focus and concern on our current fleet of PWR-reactors, and the issues associated with such structures.

The standard of such research was high, however, lacking a little in the exciting future developments of Nuclear, such as Fusion and SMRs. With the recent low carbon report by Lloyd’s Register, Nuclear can not only compete commercially with coal and gas, but also provides a cleaner energy solution as we seek to move further away from fossil fuels.

Perhaps my greatest experience whilst at the conference was meeting other engineers working in nuclear power generation from around the world. It was an interesting and promising opportunity to listen to stories of the developing careers of young engineers and scientists.”

Did you attend NUPP 2017? Let us know by getting in touch on Twitter @easlstress