Left:


Tihange 3 is due to restart in 2025


amazing quantity of projects which need to be executed in order to be on the grid in November 2025,” says Casale. That is a change in the company’s strategic workforce planning. He explains that there is a fundamental shift: nuclear operations have a very well defined process and operation, he says, but both for decommissioning and life extension “we have to move towards project mode. It is another dynamic and our staff are not used to working in that way.” Meanwhile, the June decision means the company has


changed from managing a reduction in staff and is now recruiting, while some staff who had been moving to dismantling will have to come back into operations. How does the HR department plan for these major


changes? Casale says, “You work in layers. We build up the work demand for the projects to do decommissioning, to do the life extension and of course the normal work demand which is the normal O&M for the plants that are still running. These are the three big work demands. But, of course, you can’t do all these projects at the same moment, so it is a game of planning and shifting work demands. What can we postpone? What do we really have to do now?” The post operational phase for shut down reactors, which


involves chemical decontamination of the primary circuit and spent fuel removal, will not change, as decontaminating as much and as fast as possible is a nuclear safety issue. Doel 3 underwent chemical decontamination this year and it is planned in Tihange 2 in 2024. The process was carried out by Framatome but all the preparation was done by Engie.


Maintaining the team The department had spent the last few years planning for closure of all units by 2025 by considering an “employability journey” between 2022 and 2027 (the start of dismantling) for the company’s 2000 staff. Benchmarking with other programmes in Germany, Sweden and Slovenia revealed how the requirements would change, such as moving O&M staff to radiological protection and project profiles. Casale and Claes say that while they invested in the younger generation to expand their skills, the benchmarking convinced them to focus particularly on older staff who were more than 45 years old in December 2021. “We wanted to keep them working in nuclear and till the end of career so we could maintain the expertise inside the company. Now we are very glad we have those guys and all that experience”. They saw that other companies typically focused on ‘pre-retirement’ and “they all regretted it, because they


all underestimated the work that has still to be done and the timing of it. All of them had to recall people who had put themselves on preretirement. We did the opposite”. They believe “this was a unique approach in Belgium. Very often that you let the older people retire and you keep the younger people at work and we did the opposite”. Strategic workforce planning and social dialogue started


in 2020, with the objective “to operate to the last day” and ensure business continuity and nuclear safety. With a healthy employment market in Belgium, “We had a few retention problems and we understood quite quickly that we needed to give perspective to increase the chance that they will stay with the company”. So early on, the HR department made it clear that


the current staff would remain employed to do the decommissioning, although from time to time the company would have to employ specialists. To keep people on board, “We decided in 2021 to guarantee a job for everyone until the end of 2027”. That included giving a year’s salary to staff who committed early to stay until the end of that time, because they feared a rapid reduction in 2025 once the units shut down. The company invested €18m in staff retention and


retraining, which was carried out throughout the period. Casale says he took a risk, “because in Belgium you


need to take into [account] the culture of negotiation and you have to negotiate with the unions” via a work council. “I decided to immediately come to them with a quite generous proposal a decision without the negotiation beforehand. By not using the typical ‘old recipe’ of pre- retirement for older staff the plan also chimed with Belgian government initiatives to keep older staff in work, so there was less political pressure to involve unions at an early stage of planning.” The typical approach sees negotiations at power plants because the unions are organised by site, not nationally. His fear was that this approach would lead to concessions at different sites that would be played off against each other. But he says he identified all the stakeholders and worked out what was very important for them, and “we came with commitments that were hurting us and commitments that were fair.” He adds, “It was against the Belgian culture, but we


succeeded.”


Changing the mindset Some staff will have spent many years operating and maintaining the plants. How did they feel about being asked to decommission and dismantle them?


www.neimagazine.com | August 2023 | 27


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49