As Japan moves to revitalize its nuclear power industry for the first time in 15 years since the Fukushima plant disaster, the field is flagging a shortage of industry workers. With artificial intelligence (AI) businesses recently drawing attention as future industries and driving up power demand, Japan's post–Great East Japan Earthquake decision to scale back its nuclear sector has come back as a boomerang.
According to Nikkei Asia on the 7th, major Japanese nuclear power corporations are accelerating training for manufacturing and maintenance personnel in response to moves to resume new plant construction. In its 2025 Basic Energy Plan, the Japanese government said it would revise its previous phaseout stance and expand nuclear's share from under 10% in 2023 to 20% by 2040. In fact, the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum said last year's nuclear capacity factor in Japan was 33.6%, the highest since the 2011 explosions at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Japan has returned to nuclear power because electricity demand is rising worldwide. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) projects that by 2050 global nuclear generation capacity will reach as much as 992 gigawatts, up 160% from 2024. In particular, as AI data center businesses gain attention and power demand surges, carbon-free nuclear power is back in the spotlight.
But the field is reporting a lack of personnel. One reason the nuclear workforce in Japan shrank is the Fukushima plant disaster triggered by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. A tsunami simultaneously knocked out power supply and cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company, and core meltdowns and hydrogen explosions at Units 1–3 forced about 160,000 residents to evacuate. Tokyo Electric Power Company then halted all nuclear operations.
After the Fukushima disaster, Japan became cautious about the nuclear industry, shrinking the employment base. New construction personnel at corporations affiliated with the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum fell to about 2,300, half the 2009 level. Skilled workers with construction experience also declined sharply. IHI last produced a pressure vessel about eight years ago, and the share of workers at Hitachi with experience in new nuclear construction was found to be only about 15% of the total.
The situation is similar in academia. The number of graduate students entering nuclear-related programs has been flat for the past 10 years, and departments that kept the name "nuclear" fell from 10 in the 1980s to 2 now. Nikkei Asia analyzed this as an "effect of fewer opportunities to gain on-site experience as new construction was halted after the Fukushima accident."
However, with signs of a nuclear revival emerging, Japan's nuclear industry has begun investing actively to increase on-site workers. IHI plans to invest about 20 billion yen (185.74 billion won) in its Yokohama plant over the next three years and raise headcount from 800 to around 1,000 by 2030. It also introduced a program to cut the training period for welders of pressure vessels, a core reactor component, to one-fifth of the previous duration. Using welding helmets with cameras and video training materials, the goal is to shorten training from the current five to 10 years to about one to two years.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is running a program of about 50 courses that uses Virtual Reality (VR) to train across design, construction, and maintenance. Hitachi is also compiling roughly 16,000 core technologies related to nuclear plant construction and maintenance to build a technology transfer system.