Plant Staffing Trends
Average plant staffing at U.S. nuclear power stations peaked in the 1970s and 1980s with 1,500 workers or more per unit. Coincidentally, the then-moribund industry reported average plant capacity factors hovering around 60% through much of the 1980s. Since 2000, the industry average capacity factor has remained close to 90% following a renaissance in construction and operating and maintenance process improvements implemented in the 1990s. Nuclear refueling outages are also extremely manpower-intensive. In 1991, the industry’s average refueling outage duration was 106 days. By 2000, the length of a typical refueling outage was reduced to 44 days; it dropped further, to 38 days, in 2008.
Left unanswered is the question of whether staffing at nuclear plants has been cut beyond what was economically justified — to the point where key capabilities have been compromised. One recent indicator of this latter trend is the rise in the number of worker fatigue incidents since 2000. Because fatigue degrades workers’ critical skills and abilities, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken steps to address worker scheduling, the needs of an aging workforce, highly variable workloads, and factors related to specific tasks in new guidelines covering specific work hour and break limits and minimum day off requirements. The guidelines — NEI06-11, "Managing Personnel Fatigue at Nuclear Reactor Sites" and NRC RG 5,73, "Fatigue Management for Nuclear Power Plant Personnel" — went into effect on October 1, 2009.
Another significant trend in the U.S. nuclear power industry is consolidation of a large number of plants under a single operating company. This approach allows the sharing of best practices and a centralized staff of technical experts while cutting costs.
Most plants also endured a period of "right sizing" in the 1990s to reduce plant nonfuel operating costs, about 50% of which are staffing costs. The operational achievements of the nuclear industry over the past decade are all the more remarkable given that average plant staffing has been reduced by a third or more since 2000.
As the total number of nuclear plant workers (Figure 1) and average plant staffing levels (Figure 2) have remained constant over the past few years, outages to replace steam generators and other major plant equipment have increased, as have outages for plant power uprates (see "Nuclear Uprates Add Critical Capacity," May 2009). The staffing distribution for all nuclear plants by category is shown in Figure 3. Plant quartile staffing levels are shown in Table 3. Note that all the data reported in this article are calculated as full-time equivalent (FTE) workers.
1. Total U.S. nuclear industry average staffing by plant (2004–2008). Staffing includes on-site and off-site employees and baseline contractors. The split between worker groups has remained reasonably constant over the past five years of reported data. Source: EUCG
2. Industry average number of workers at U.S. nuclear power plants (2004–2008). Average plant staffing, including on-site and off-site employees and baseline contractors, has changed less than 1% over the past five years of reported data. Source: EUCG
3. Full-time equivalent staffing at each U.S. nuclear power plant in 2008. Source: EUCG
Table 3. Statistical distribution of classes of workers per plant at U.S. nuclear power plants in 2008. Each statistic is calculated independently, thus the columns may not sum to the column total. Source: EUCG
The downside to merely counting FTEs is that this metric does not account for worker productivity. The best metric for overall worker productivity must be the quantity of electricity generated by a plant. For the purposes of this discussion, total generating costs are defined as the sum of plant support and other costs, fuel, and capital costs in a year. This definition is consistent with that used in the prior benchmarking article.
To calculate the staff productivity metric, the total generating costs are divided by the FTE at a particular plant. Data were then arranged into industry quartiles. Figure 4 illustrates the nuclear industry’s staffing productivity for 2008; Figure 5 illustrates the staffing productivity trend over the past three years. The names of the plants in each quartile of these two figures are different and are available only from the original data set provided to the sponsoring organizations. The staffing productivity for all nuclear plants by worker category is shown in Figure 6. Plant quartile staffing levels are shown in Table 4.
4. Total U.S. nuclear industry generating cost per full-time equivalent worker in 2008. The statistics are calculated by summing the cost categories of plant support and other costs, fuel, and capital; that total is then divided by the number of full-time equivalent workers at each nuclear plant (Figure 2). Total generating cost is the sum of plant support and other related costs, plus fuel, plus capital costs, divided by the plant’s FTE workers. Source: EUCG
5. Average generating cost of each U.S. nuclear power plant per full-time equivalent employee (2006–2008). The statistics are calculated by summing the cost categories of plant support and other costs, fuel, and capital; that total is then divided by the number of full-time equivalent workers at each nuclear plant (Figure 2). Source: EUCG
6. Annual full-time equivalent staffing at each U.S. nuclear power plant per unit of installed capacity in 2008. Source: EUCG
Table 4. Benchmarking worker productivity. Statistical distribution of classes of nuclear workers per unit of installed capacity at U.S. nuclear power plants in 2008. Each statistic is calculated independently, thus the columns will not sum to the column total. The data are shown in FTE workers per MWh of electricity produced. Source: EUCG
The data indicate that the productivity of the bottom two quartiles of plants slipped in 2008 while that of the top-quartile plants has remained constant over the reporting period. This trend may show that the large nuclear operating companies have a built-in staff productivity advantage over the smaller nuclear utilities that is growing. In 1991, 101 individual utilities had some ownership interest in a nuclear power plant. Today, the top 10 nuclear utilities own more than 70% of the U.S. nuclear capacity, according to the World Nuclear Association.
—Dr. Robert Peltier, PE is POWER's editor-in-chief.
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