Principal / Senior Nuclear Safety Engineer

Closing Date:  01/11/2024

Locations: Manchester / Gloucester

About newcleo

Privately funded and headquartered in London, newcleo was launched in 2021 – and since raised a total of EUR 400m – to be an innovator in the field of nuclear energy. Its mission is to generate safe, clean, economic and practically inexhaustible energy for the world, through a radically innovative combination of existing, accessible technologies.

With visionary co-founders, newcleo capitalises on thirty years of R&D activity in metal-cooled fast reactors and liquid-lead cooling systems, and our senior management and advisory team can boast hundreds of years in cumulative hands-on experience. 

newcleo’s technology, mostly comprising a novel approach to already qualified solutions, addresses equally well the three challenges affecting the nuclear industry to date: waste, safety and cost.

• Waste: fast reactors are capable of efficient use of depleted uranium, plutonium and Minor Actinides. When operated with MOX fuel generated from reprocessed nuclear waste, newcleo’s reactors not only ensure sustainability by closing the fuel cycle, but can also boost energy independence.
• Safety: lead-cooled reactors operate at atmospheric pressure. The properties of lead (thermal capacity and conductivity, boiling point, chemically inert, low neutron activation, shielding properties) together with newcleo’s passive safety systems ensure very high levels of safety.
• Cost: newcleo’s reactor design has been optimised over the last 20 years leading to the concept of an ultra-compact and transportable 200MWe module with improvements in energy density compared to other technologies. Costs are kept low by means of simplicity, compactness, modularity, atmospheric pressure operation and elevated output temperature.

newcleo is also working to significantly invest in MOX fuel manufacturing in developed countries, extracting energy from the current nuclear industry by-products.

newcleo is ready to develop a new, sustainable, and completely safe way of generating nuclear energy that will help humanity reach zero emissions, and mitigate of global warming.

Overview of the role:

Due to continued expansion, we are looking to speak with Senior Nuclear Safety Engineers to join our UK team!

newcleo is driving forwards an exciting and challenging international programme to develop and deploy our innovative Lead-cooled Fast Reactor technology, with an initial focus on France and the UK. As part of LFR design development, the safety assessment is being developed, recognising the different countries licensing regimes.

In this role you will work as a Senior Safety Engineer in the Safety for Design (SXD) team, playing a significant role in carrying out safety assessments and working in close collaboration with our design teams.  

Reporting to our Safety Case Lead, the key duties of the role include:

• Working as part of the SXD supporting both UK and French projects
• Carrying out nuclear safety assessments, supporting design development and safety case production as required,
• Identification of regulatory requirements and good practice relevant to nuclear safety.
• Deterministic safety assessment of the design (defence in depth, single failure tolerance, diversity assessment, consideration of potential hazards and failure modes etc.)
• Defining and explaining safety requirements on systems and components to support the design development.
• Supporting safety studies such as transient analyses and analyses of internal and external hazards.
• Production of safety documentation including contributions to safety case and licensing documents.
• Working in close collaboration with multi-disciplinary and multi-location design teams to develop design options that are able to satisfy safety requirements, and to specify additional analyses required to support selection and substantiation of design options. 
• Reviewing design and operational documents from a safety perspective.
• Contributing to the planning and organisation of work across the SXD team.
• Guiding more junior members of the SXD team in their work.

This role will offer opportunities for development & progression towards management or expert activities depending on your career motivations. But don’t just take our word for it, below is a testimonial from one of our employees around their experience since joining newcleo:

“Working for newcleo is a unique opportunity to learn new technical areas (lead fast reactor design), enjoy collaboration and travel with a great team of European colleagues, and work on a developing design. Unlike many UK new build projects which are bringing established vendor products, there is the opportunity to contribute to significant design decisions, and set up safety and design methods based on UK and European good practice from the beginning. The newcleo team culture is collaborative and fast-paced, with genuine openness to incorporating your experience in a new context, as well as giving an opportunity to learn from other cultures, and the deep experience among our European colleagues and collaborators. If you are up for a significant challenge and opportunity to learn, then think about working for newcleo!”

The role can be based in our Manchester or Gloucester offices, where we have a hybrid & flexible working policy of 3 days per week in the office. There is also travel opportunities to our offices in Turin (Italy) and Lyon (France), in order to collaborate and build strong working relationships across our Global Engineering Team.

Is this role right for you?

We would like to speak to people who have:

• A background & experience in nuclear safety in any one of the following areas
  • Hazard identification (HAZOP / FMEA / SWIFT and similar techniques)
  • Fault analyses (fault schedules, transient or radiological analyses)
  • Internal and / or external hazards - characterisation of the hazard, development of appropriate lines of defence and their justification.
  • Structural integrity safety case – especially for higher safety significance items (High Integrity / Incredibility of Failure)
• Experience working with design teams on new build projects or significant modifications including optioneering processes.
• Experience producing and verifying safety documentation
• Right to work full time in the UK & can achieve a national security clearance equivalent to a BPSS standard, or higher, within a reasonable period.

Please note if you meet some but not all of the requirements above, we would still been really keen to hear from you!

If you are not ready to apply just yet, or have a few questions? Contact Cameron Emerson at Cameron.emerson@newcleo.com

Please note, all applications will need to go through via our online portal to be compliant with GDPR.