Building an efficient European nuclear energy supply chain: Why we need a unified Nuclear Skills Passport
As Europe accelerates its clean energy transition and works to strengthen its energy security, nuclear energy has re-emerged as a vital pillar of the continent’s low-carbon future. Meeting ambitious climate targets, ensuring energy security and competitiveness at the same time requires moving away from one-off, bespoke reactor builds and embracing a shift toward fleet deployment. Standardised, repeatable construction models lower capital costs, streamline regulatory oversight, and dramatically shorten build schedules.
This model is especially critical for small modular reactors (SMRs). Because SMRs are designed to be factory-manufactured and rapidly assembled on site, their economic viability relies heavily on swift, standardised, and overlapping deployment schedules across multiple locations.
However, scaling up a fleet of conventional reactors and SMRs exposes a critical vulnerability in the clean energy supply chain: workforce.
According to the European Commission’s Nuclear Illustrative Programme (PINC) report, the EU may see more than 60GW of new nuclear projects between now and 2025. To deliver multiple reactors across Member States within tight climate deadlines, Europe cannot afford localised labor shortages or fragmented qualification systems. Building a resilient nuclear energy supply chain requires a dynamic, mobile, and highly trained workforce that can seamlessly transition from one construction site to another across national borders.
The bottleneck: Workforce mobility across the fleet
Deploying nuclear energy at a fleet scale – particularly for SMR rollouts – creates a sequential, high-tempo demand for specialised labor. Specialised welders, quality assurance engineers, civil technicians, and radiation protection experts are needed in high concentrations during specific, condensed phases of construction.
Once an SMR unit’s site preparation or specialised module integration is complete, that skilled team must be ready to shift immediately to the next site – whether that is in Poland, France, the Czech Republic, or Sweden. Without efficient mobility mechanisms, the velocity advantage inherent to SMR fleet deployment is severely compromised.
Today, cross-border workforce mobility faces significant non-technological barriers. Redundant site-access vetting, varied national accreditation and safety standards, and fragmented vocational training requirements create administrative friction. Experienced professionals often spend weeks or months re-certifying skills they have already demonstrated elsewhere, stalling momentum and inflating project budgets.
If we are to build a European nuclear energy supply chain capable of delivering at scale, we must treat skilled human capital as a shared, flexible asset across the region.
Reviving a proven framework: The Nuclear Skills Passport
Two decades ago, the UK’s National Skills Academy Nuclear (NSAN) introduced a groundbreaking concept: the Nuclear Skills Passport. Recognised for its merit, the proposal was evaluated by the European Commission and considered across several nuclear energy-capable nations as a model for workforce standardisation.
At the time, some top industry players expressed concerns that such a tool would increase worker mobility after expensive and time-consuming vocational trainings and turn the labor market into a competitive “free-for-all,” potentially making worker retention harder for individual operators. However, today’s reality demands a shift in perspective. If Europe is to build a truly robust, resilient, and integrated supply chain, we must actively support workforce mobility rather than restrict it. A localised workforce model cannot sustain a multi-national fleet deployment strategy; cross-border fluidity is precisely what will allow both conventional builds and SMR fleets to remain on schedule and within budget.
It is time to formally reintroduce and elevate this framework into a recognised European vocational tool, endorsed and adopted by the European Nuclear Alliance and Member States.
The Nuclear Skills Passport can function as a secure, standardised digital record of a worker’s training, safety credentials, security clearances, and technical competencies. Implementing this tool across Europe would deliver key structural benefits:
- Clear pathways for workers: It can provide vocational professionals with a transparent roadmap of their qualifications, career progression, and continuous professional development, making the nuclear energy sector more attractive to young talent and transitioning skilled labor from traditional industries.
- Streamlined hiring for employers: Contractors and plant operators could gain verified, instant visibility into an applicant’s qualifications, dramatically accelerating onboarding times while reducing administrative costs across supply chains.
- Uncompromising safety standards: A standardised passport can embed rigorous, European recognised safety and quality standards across all participating sites, reinforcing the nuclear energy sector’s core priority: safety above all.
Ready for execution: Built on EHRO-N research
Implementing a unified European vocational passport does not require starting from scratch. The groundwork has already been laid by the European Human Resources Observatory in Nuclear (EHRO-N).
Through extensive research and mapping, EHRO-N developed comprehensive job profiles and specified the exact skill sets, competencies, and learning outcomes required across the life cycle of nuclear energy facilities. By aligning the Nuclear Skills Passport directly with EHRO-N’s established job profiles, European institutions can bypass years of preliminary mapping and rapidly deploy a functional system.
Moving from ambition to deployment
Deploying a clean energy fleet – from gigawatt-scale plants to versatile SMRs – is an infrastructure challenge that requires proactive, highly coordinated planning. A supply chain is only as strong as the skilled people who build it.
To turn Europe’s nuclear ambitions into physical infrastructure, European policymakers, national regulators, and industry leaders must prioritize workforce logistics. Recognizing the Nuclear Skills Passport as an official European vocational tool will unlock cross-border mobility, protect worker safety, and build the resilient supply chain necessary to deliver clean energy at scale.
