Nuclear build plus manufacturing

A joint project between the universities of Manchester and Sheffield for a New Nuclear Build and Manufacturing (NNUMAN) programme has been awarded £4m funding by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to research innovative manufacturing for the future of the UK's nuclear power supply.

A recent House of Lords' Science and Technology Committee report - Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities - identified insufficient research and development capacity as a potential threat to the UK's ability to produce power from nuclear energy.

The proposal from Manchester and Sheffield addressed this concern by promoting research and development to evolve a robust civil nuclear power supply to meet UK and global energy needs well into the future with significant work on the fundamentals of manufacturing f generation of power stations.

The most improved manufacturing processes developed in NNUMAN will be taken forward to prototype in the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Rotherham and the National Nuclear Laboratory to enable UK manufacturing companies to learn the benefits of the new methods and use them in the future.

Through a programme of multidisciplinary research at Manchester and Sheffield, the next generation of nuclear manufacturing scientists and engineers will be trained with the highest level of academic and technical support, using world-class facilities and with strong links to industry.