How Not to Build Nuclear Reactors

Abstract

The hype about building new nuclear power plants could backfire if suppliers and labor make big plans today on a future that is far from assured.

While the commercial global nuclear industry was expanding in the 1960s, researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management were busy working toward a different kind of goal: how to regulate supplies of beer. With the aim of illustrating how hard it can be to manage a supply chain, the researchers invented a deceptively simple game about beer distribution. Today, management companies like IBM are trying to use “beer game” methods to jump-start construction in the U.S. nuclear industry, which has not ordered a new reactor since 1978. As in the beer game, however, excitement about a possible nuclear expansion might hurt more than help the industry.

The beer game starts with low demand for an obscure brand called Lover's Beer. 1 By chance, a rock band mentions it in a music video, creating buzz about the beer. Retailers soon notice more people buying the beer. Fearing that time lags in distribution will cause rapid depletion of their inventories, retailers place large orders with wholesalers to meet projected increased demand.

Likewise, wholesalers are concerned about delays in brewing the beer and place large orders with the brewery. As the sole source, the brewery becomes the major bottleneck–no pun intended–in the supply chain. By the time the brewery can fill the requests, demand drops off, causing huge excess inventories and resulting in lost revenue for retailers, wholesalers, and the brewery. This supply chain problem is a classic example of “the bullwhip effect” because orders along the chain get amplified like the motion along a bullwhip.

A similar effect could plague the nuclear energy supply chain. The initial growth of nuclear energy in the 1960s spurred the emergence of an industry of manufacturers to supply parts for these unique, large-scale construction projects. As the number of nuclear reactors built slowed in parts of the world, starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, the industrial support base contracted. The recent increase in demand for nuclear reactors has aggravated bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain. Only Japan Steel Works, for instance, can now make ultra-heavy forgings that form the newest large reactor pressure vessels–the central component of any reactor. U.S. utilities have expressed concern that they will not receive this critical part in time and have placed orders for these forgings long before they have received a license to build a nuclear power plant. If a license is not approved, a utility could try to recoup some money by selling its place in the queue to another company. But this practice could disrupt the manufacturer's efficiency and spur the bullwhip effect. While the demand for large reactor pressure vessels will be most severe, other parts, including coolant pumps, steam pressurizers, steam and diesel generators, and instrumentation, are also likely to be in short supply.

Increased worldwide demand for electricity further stresses the supply chain. Because nuclear power companies compete with those seeking to build coal and natural gas power plants, there is a global grab for basic commodities like concrete, copper, and steel to build all of these plants. Faced with tough choices about paying for these goods, utility owners favor buying plants with lower capital costs, such as those fueled by coal and gas. While consistently high natural gas prices and fees levied on greenhouse gas emitters would tilt the scale toward nuclear power plants, the nuclear industry confronts other challenges, including relatively few suppliers of “nuclear-grade” parts and shortages in skilled personnel to build and operate the plants.

Sounding an alarm about these challenges, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the policy organization for the U.S. nuclear technologies industry, released in April 2007 excerpts from an internal study. 2 It recommended that members of the industry, not only in the United States but all over the world, adopt several practices to attempt to avoid supply and personnel shortages and avoid the bullwhip effect: Design, engineering, and manufacturing firms should collaborate to streamline schedules for making parts; electric utilities should inform manufacturers of the necessary amount and quality of new plant components; and the energy industry “should pursue aggressive outreach to encourage communication among electric companies, reactor designers, vendors, and equipment manufacturers” and assess the commodity market to determine how constraints on raw materials could affect nuclear plant construction.

THE SUPPLY OF REACTOR COMPONENTS

Assembling the many components for a new nuclear reactor in the United States will require the coordination of manufacturers around the globe. And under some circumstances, even a global supply chain won't be sufficient to meet expected demand.

REACTOR VESSEL

The central component of all nuclear reactors, the reactor pressure vessel houses the fission reactions that drive power production. Only Japan Steel Works is capable of manufacturing the 600-ton forgings necessary for vessels used in some current reactor designs. This bottleneck is causing companies to place their orders for reactor vessels long before they have decided to build a reactor.

PLANT SIMULATORS

new nuclear reactors will require at least one control system simulator to train plant operators and license the reactor. Sufficient hardware is expected to be available for near-term U.S. demand, though designing and manufacturing plant simulators and digital plant control systems is expected to require extra schedule time and has the potential to delay reactor operation.

VALVES

Three types of nuclear-grade valves–on/off valves, control valves, and pressure relief/safety valves–are ubiquitous in plant design. Sufficient supplies of valves exist to support near-term U.S. reactor construction. and manufacturers are eager to increase production if demand increases.

PIPES AND METALS

The current generation of reactors relies heavily on piping with a high percentage of nickel alloys to connect components such as pumps, the reactor vessel, and turbines. Despite the apparent plethora of metal suppliers, the availability and cost of piping and metal for nuclear plants is heavily dependent on metal markets, which fluctuate along with global economic cycles.

PUMPS

Electric pumps–coolant pumps, feedwater pumps, safety-related pumps, and heat-removal pumps–are essential to moving liquids and steam throughout the reactor and turbines. The plethora of domestic and foreign pump manufacturers will likely support near-term U.S. reactor development. U.S. pump-manufacturing capacity would have to be expanded to support longer-term expansion and reactor construction in asia.

Can the nuclear industry tame its competitive urges? IBM hopes so. Last July, it launched the Global Center of Excellence for Nuclear Power. Providing guidance for this center is the IBM Nuclear Power Advisory Council. 3 In a December 2007 report, the group underscored the need for transparency between nuclear power operators and suppliers. Echoing NEI's call for collaboration, IBM offers its center as a focal point for nuclear companies all over the world to cooperate by sharing information and using IBM's consulting services. The center is based in La Gaude, France, because of IBM's experience in designing information technology systems for the French nuclear industry, which supplies 78 percent of the country's electricity.

While the NEI and IBM initiatives may bring competing players together, policy makers and utility companies will have to work diligently to remove the many roadblocks to future nuclear growth. The International Atomic Energy Agency listed 34 commercial reactors under construction in 13 countries as of July 2008. 4 Not all of these reactors, however, are the consequence of recent orders. In the United States, for example, Tennessee's Watts Bar 2 reactor began construction in 1972. And in Russia, four of the six reactors under construction date back to the mid-1980s. In Europe, only two reactors are being built–one in Finland and one in France. By contrast, China, India, and South Korea have begun constructing 16 new reactors since 2000. China's accelerated growth has placed the largest amount of stress on the global supply chain in both nuclear and conventional power sectors.

While nearly all of these under-construction reactors have the necessary parts and people, the outlook for additional reactors is murky. Forecasts for global nuclear-generated electricity in 2030 range from 13 to 125 percent above the current installed capacity of about 370 gigawatts. 5 According to separate studies at Princeton University and MIT, to reach the high end of this growth range, electric companies would have to connect to the grid one new large reactor every two weeks, beginning now and continuing for the next 40 years–a level of growth not seen since the apex of the 1980s. 6

In the United States, estimates of the number of nuclear reactors likely to come online in the next few decades have soared recently from a handful to as many as 32. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Dale Klein told Nucleonics Week in January that he expected construction to proceed in two waves. The first would include only a few reactors, due to worldwide constraints on supplies and personnel. The second wave, he optimistically concluded, would bring the total of new reactors to 32. 7 Supporting Klein's view, the Energy Department assessed in 2005 that up to eight reactors could be built from 2010 to 2017 as long as “the right resources [are] available at the right place and the right time.” 8

To kick-start the first U.S. wave, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provided financial incentives, including tax credits, regulatory risk insurance, and loan guarantees, for the first 6,000 megawatts of newly constructed reactor capacity–equivalent to six 1,000-megawatt reactors or about four of the larger 1,600-megawatt reactors. 9 To qualify for these incentives, reactor owners would need to meet certain goals. The first goal is to file for a combined operating license with the NRC before the end of 2008. To be fully eligible for the financial incentive, a utility must begin reactor construction by 2014. If more than 6,000 megawatts of reactors meet the requirements, the tax credit would be divided on a proportional basis. The 2008 deadline is spurring the recent influx in license applications. From November 2007 to June 2008, the NRC accepted nine complete applications. It expects to receive nine more before the end of the year. These applications represent a potential for 27 new reactor units.

Meant to spur construction, these incentives could also cause price fluctuations for parts and wide swings in inventories, even though no new construction has begun. Supply chain management strategies suggest that a special promotion such as a subsidy acts like a price discount, potentially spurring a customer to buy in bigger amounts than needed or buy parts far in advance of when needed. Such forward buying could obscure real demand.

On the other hand, building nuclear reactors is a unique process, because it takes a long time–seven to ten years including the time to acquire a license. Accordingly, some U.S. utilities have already placed orders for pressure vessels and other major parts, such as steam generators. Energy's 2005 report underscores that the main material constraint for the coming years is acquiring reactor pressure vessels. In response to the ramped-up demand, Japan Steel Works plans to expand its forging capacity through “the largest investment in its 100-year history.” 10 The plant can currently produce enough forgings for 5.5 reactors each year, and by 2010 will be able to produce enough for 8.5 reactors. But even this increase will not meet the projected global building plans.

Competitors see a business opportunity, but presently, no other manufacturer but Japan Steel Works can make 600-ton forging molds to form the vessels. And no company can match its reputation for quality. Best known for crafting samurai swords, Japan Steel Works makes high-quality steel, famous for its uniform strength, through exclusive techniques that at least one industry executive describes as “more art than science.” 11 The only possible competitor is Britain's Sheffield Forgemasters International, Ltd. Its board of directors said in April that the company could make 600-ton forgings within three years. Peter Birtles, a group director at Sheffield Forgemasters, told Nucleonics Week that the company is “looking at an average nuclear construction rate between now and 2025 of around 12 to 13” new reactors per year. 12 But even this ambitious rate would account for only about half of the upper-end forecasts for global nuclear growth.

COUNTERPOINT: NUCLEAR IS READY FOR A COMEBACK

As the momentum for new nuclear power plants increases, critics of this energy source insist that building these plants cannot possibly be accomplished due to the lack of a robust supply chain and a shortage of experienced people. While both issues pose challenges for the nuclear power industry, concluding that they will prevent the construction of new plants doesn't take into account ongoing initiatives to address these challenges, the existing infrastructure that is available to accommodate the first plants to be constructed, and the basic market forces of supply and demand.

While it's true the supply chain has shrunk since the nuclear industry's heyday, when it completed 15 plants per year in 1973 and 1974, there is still an infrastructure in place, and it's supporting a broad range of ongoing projects. The existing supply chain is meeting the needs of major nuclear projects such as the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at hanford, Washington, an Energy Department project being constructed by Bechtel to address legacy waste from the nuclear weapons program that will require twice the amount of materials to complete compared to existing nuclear plants. it has also supported the successful restart of the Tennessee Valley authority's (TVA) Browns Ferry nuclear Power Plant unit One in northern alabama (a project on which Bechtel performed engineering, procurement, and startup services), further demonstrating that there is sufficient capacity to support building new nuclear power plants.

Furthermore, the supply chain that currently services the existing fleet of plants is substantial (roughly $4.3 billion was spent in 2007) and will serve as a springboard for the expansion necessary to support the construction of new plants. another indication of existing capacity is the U.S. navy's nuclear construction and operating program, with an annual budget of roughly $2 billion, which is almost entirely sourced from domestic vendors.

Several years ago the idaho national laboratory and Bechtel conducted a study for the Energy Department to estimate the number of jobs that would be created by a new nuclear construction and operation program. as part of this initiative, Bechtel interviewed many of the suppliers and vendors that supported the previous construction wave. almost unanimously they asserted that once new nuclear power plants were ordered they would be back in the business. More recently, the nuclear Energy institute, the major nuclear steam supply system vendors, and nuclear architect/engineers sponsored three supplier workshops around the country to gauge the interest of the manufacturing base in new nuclear, as well as to get the message out about this potential market. hundreds of suppliers representing a broad cross section of products and services, some of whom were involved in the previous construction cycle and many new to the industry, attended these workshops and showed great interest in being part of the new construction program. This is simple, basic market dynamics at work: if you build it, they will come.

While it's true the supply chain has shrunk since the nuclear industry's heyday, when it completed 15 plants per year in 1973 and 1974, there is still an infrastructure in place, and it's supporting a broad range of ongoing projects.

The issues affecting the supply chain are similar to those affecting human resources. The existing nuclear fleet's personnel and the navy's nuclear program provide a solid base for expanding existing talent. More importantly, major ongoing nuclear projects serve as a training ground for the next generation of nuclear workers to build and operate the next generation of nuclear plants. Projects such as the completion of TVA's Watts Bar unit Two reactor in eastern Tennessee, which at the project's peak will include more than 600 design engineers, will provide a platform to transfer knowledge from industry veterans to younger engineers and construction crews. in addition to Watts Bar and the WTP Project at hanford, Bechtel is also regularly performing major work at plants around the country, such as replacing steam generators, and doing nuclear engineering and construction jobs at the national laboratories–both of which allow the next generation of professional talent to be trained.

The nuclear industry is proactively addressing another component of the human resources issue: the need for skilled craft labor, which requires a regional or even a local approach. in many areas of the country where new nuclear plants are being considered, efforts are under way to train a homegrown workforce. For example, the Texas Department of labor and major construction companies such as Bechtel support the Texas Energy Workforce academy, a program that provides industrial skills training. This program is a collaborative effort among contractors, oil companies, schools, power industry groups, and state and federal governments. a second example, the gulf Rebuild Education and Training (GREAT) Program, finds and trains highly skilled craft workers to rebuild areas impacted by hurricane Katrina and keeps them in place for major projects planned in the region, such as the new nuclear plants being considered in Texas. These and other similar programs are under way across the country.

In addition to the initiatives and existing infrastructure items noted above, the global nature of nuclear power must be factored into any discussion of building new U.S. reactors. While U.S. utilities have not ordered any new plants in more than two decades, new construction has continued overseas. Outside the united States, a robust nuclear supply chain and an experienced engineering and construction workforce can be tapped to facilitate the new U.S. build. This distributed approach could include the global sourcing of materials, preassembly and modular fabrication of components, as well as the use of non-U.S. design centers. This strategy has been well utilized in other industrial sectors such as fossil power, and it reduces the impact on domestic resources.

Critics should also take into account the pace at which new nuclear construction will occur. The industry anticipates breaking ground on six to eight power stations within the next three to four years; these plants would go online by 2017. These early movers would be followed by a second wave once the certainty of outcomes of the licensing process and construction schedules have been confirmed. a massive and quick rebuild of infrastructure will not be required to meet this demand, but rather a measured ramp-up to accommodate a measured construction program.

Thus, it's flawed to think that supply chain or workforce issues will derail the development of new nuclear power plants in the united States. The existing infrastructure, coupled with current initiatives, access to a global supply network, and simple, proven market dynamics will all help offset any current shortfalls in these areas and will facilitate the growth of the necessary resources as the first wave of new construction moves forward.

BRIAN P. REILLY

Brian P. Reilly is principal vice president and manager of nuclear operations for Bechtel Power Corporation. Reilly oversees all of Bechtel's global nuclear power activities. He most recently served as Bechtel's project director for the Browns Ferry Unit One restart project and has 28 years of experience in the energy industry.

One option for competitors unable to make ultra-large forgings would be to combine smaller molds to make large pressure vessels. For example, AREVA, the global leader in reactor construction, could use 350-ton molds available from its subsidiary Creusot Forge in France. But more molds mean more welds, which would require more inspections to ensure the strength of pressure vessels. More inspections would increase costs, because they require the plant to shut down for a longer period of time. For every day a plant remains offline, a utility company incurs approximately $1 million in lost profit.

The shortfall in ultra-heavy forgings has spurred an alliance between a Chinese and a South Korean company. Doosan Heavy Industries in South Korea won the contract for the reactor vessel forgings for the first two Westinghouse-de-signed AP1000 reactors being built in China, but it subcontracted the forgings for the first reactor to homegrown China Heavy Industries. (These companies will use forgings smaller than 600 tons. The AP1000 requires nine integrated forgings to make its reactor pressure vessel.) China's strategy of using some foreign vendors illustrates how it is planning to leverage foreign nuclear technology as needed and use it to build up its indigenous industry. In the long term, Chinese companies could emerge as suppliers for the complete range of nuclear power plant parts.

In contrast, the United States can no longer make all of the equipment needed for nuclear power plants. And the pool of U.S. companies that can make reactor parts has shrunk compared to the heyday of American nuclear construction. “Two decades ago there were about 400 suppliers and 900 so-called nuclear-stamp, or N-stamp, certifications from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers [ASME]. Today there are fewer than 80 suppliers in the United States and fewer than 200 N-stamp certifications,” Ray Ganthner, senior vice president of AREVA NP Inc.'s New Plants Deployment division, told Nucleonics Week. 13 The silver lining, however, is that the decline in the number of suppliers and certifications is not completely caused by industry atrophy. Some of these reductions reflect mergers, and the number of nuclear certificate requests has risen slightly over the past two years. 14

As the United States prepares to expand its nuclear energy capacity, the power industry must also navigate myriad personnel obstacles. In the commercial nuclear sector, 27 percent of all employees, or 15,600 people, will be eligible to retire by the end of 2009. By the industry's own estimates, nearly half of its employees are more than 47 years old, while less than 8 percent are younger than 32 years old. 15 Replacing retiring workers and expanding the labor force–all without a sizable generation of mid-level employees–are thus formidable barriers to any nuclear expansion. These challenges could also distort upstream labor demand in a manner similar to the volatility found in material supply chains. Though the bullwhip effect is not conventionally applied to human resources, it is an apt analogy when observing and analyzing the personnel challenges facing the nuclear industry as it prepares for its first wave of new plant orders.

In 2005, Energy estimated the number of people that would be needed to construct, inspect, bring online, and operate new nuclear power plants, beginning in 2010. Its report predicted a peak labor requirement of 8,000 construction workers and a total labor requirement of 12,000 to build eight reactor units, if each project progressed on a five-year construction schedule. 16 More than half of these personnel would have to be craft laborers, the most skilled and in-demand subset of construction workers that exists nationwide. Energy also laid out the need for 200 quality control inspectors, 400 construction supervisors, 500 construction engineers, 1,000 operation and maintenance staff, 100 NRC inspectors, and 300 start-up personnel. 17

The government, nuclear industry, and relevant professional associations have since identified the most likely and most severe labor resource shortfalls within these categories. A common trend emerged in their studies. Boilermakers, ironworkers, pipe fitters, nondestructive testing professionals, reactor operators, health physicists, and nuclear engineers are all in short supply due to previous stagnation within the nuclear industry, high rates of projected retirement, and longer than typical lead times to train inexperienced personnel. Many trade schools no longer teach nuclear-specific skills, and the capacity for experienced workers to transfer their knowledge is limited by how quickly they retire. At the university level, the number of departments offering degrees in nuclear engineering or health physics is only beginning to come back from a 25-year free fall. Since 1980, the number of nuclear engineering programs in U.S. universities dropped from 65 to just 29. 18

Finally, the nuclear industry must compete for the same labor pool as other utility companies that are planning major coal and natural gas plant construction. To illustrate the potential stress on the labor supply, consider that construction workers with specific experience in utility systems represent just 5.4 percent of the construction sector. 19 And the long absence of new U.S. reactor construction means that even fewer are qualified to work on safety-related equipment, such as ASME-code pressure vessels and high-energy steam piping. In fact, nuclear labor shortages are already making a mark. Last year, Andrew White, the head of General Electric's nuclear group, cited the engineer shortage as the reason the company missed NRC approval deadlines for its new reactor design. 20

To address these shortages, the U.S. government and nuclear power companies have crafted several strategies. The Department of Labor has identified nuclear power as a part of its High-Growth Job Training Initiative, for which it subsidizes training and recruitment programs. The industry has also set up training programs near planned reactor sites, including partnerships with other utility companies, community colleges, trade institutes, and the military. For example, in 2007, Westinghouse purchased a welding school in South Carolina and plans to replicate this model around the country. Manufacturer AREVA and utilities Exelon and Duke Energy also have their own joint programs with educational institutions near planned reactor sites, training radiation protection personnel, reactor operators, and nuclear safety inspectors.

The long-term effects of anticipating labor demand–all before plant construction begins–remain unknown. Based on Energy's estimate of eight new nuclear power plants by 2017, the current number of construction craft laborers, nuclear engineers, and radiation protection professionals will not meet the demand. In this case, it is fairly straightforward to anticipate a shortfall. Personnel shortages may delay some construction activities, but they will also be limited to certain professional subsets. In contrast, if NEI estimates of up to 32 new nuclear plants form the basis of industry planning–in other words a true nuclear renaissance–then nuclear energy companies should forecast and prepare for massive nuclear personnel shortages across the board.

The bullwhip model demonstrates how such a shortage mind-set could lead to distorted demand and misguided, albeit rational, choices in the labor market. Examples range from an individual's decision to train to work in the nuclear industry to an industry decision to invest in local vocational schools, to a government decision to fund scholarships for nuclear sciences. All of these decisions would be based on information that may or may not realistically reflect demand. Long lead times, such as the years needed to train reactor operators and health physicists, further aggravate the bullwhip effect.

People's careers and companies' survival are at stake in this latest nuclear expansion. If the renaissance falters, many professionals could find themselves without the jobs of their choice and could require a long time to retool or find a comparable job. Also, a halt in nuclear construction could harm the financial health of companies that boosted their capacities in anticipation of new construction. For example, Japan Steel Works' orders plunged after Germany decided in 1998 to phase out nuclear power. As a result, the company was not profitable for three straight years. 21 And if nuclear flourishes, it will compete with greater global demand for finite material resources and skilled personnel to build all types of electrical power plants. As supply management research has shown, the rationing of limited resources can exacerbate the bullwhip effect in the supply chain.

So, how then can the industry counteract this potential effect? It can start by instituting further information sharing, which would allow parts of the supply chain to communicate about demand more regularly and accurately. Channel alignment, the coordination of “pricing, transportation, inventory planning, and ownership between the upstream and downstream sites in a supply chain,” is another strategy. 22 These methods could also apply to labor supply chains.

The increasing globalization of the industry, as exemplified by mergers of companies based in different countries, provides hopeful signs for both methods. In recent years, for example, Toshiba merged with Westinghouse and bought a stake in Kazakhstan's uranium reserves; Hitachi merged with General Electric's nuclear division; and AREVA has formed several alliances, including one with Japanese manufacturing giant Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. More mergers are likely.

The important point for lessening the bullwhip effect is that it is likely to be easier to share information between the internal parts of conglomerates that include all or most aspects of a nuclear plant's construction needs. In the United States, the NRC modified its new reactor application process to favor standardized design and streamlined construction, a regulatory model the industry advocated, but convergence is not a given. Giant corporations could become lumbering dinosaurs and be unable to nimbly coordinate all of their parts and functions. And although industry regulators had hoped for just two or three off-the-shelf reactor designs in the next wave of planned nuclear construction, 2008 applications to the NRC already contain five different reactor designs with more on the way. 23

A countervailing tendency in nuclear industries is national ownership of all nuclear energy-related companies. This vertical integration is an example of channel alignment. Here, Russia stands out as a prime, but still unproven, example. Last year, the Russian government reorganized its domestic nuclear industry into the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation. Led by Sergei Kiriyenko, this vertically integrated organization will manage all nuclear enterprises–including power plant operations, facility engineering and construction, fuel production and reprocessing, and technology export–through a holding company. It would like to become “the Boeing of nuclear power production” for the world, as a top-level Russian government adviser told one of us. Yet, Russia is struggling to meet ambitious plans for its domestic nuclear expansion. For its aspirations to come to pass, Russia must understand that in a global economy, no country controls all aspects of the supply chain. Even a unified industry cannot insulate itself from commodity fluctuations, material scarcities, and labor shortages such as those seen today.

Recognizing and addressing these and other potential barriers to new reactor construction will be essential in order to achieve a nuclear renaissance or anything approaching it. At least among politicians, this sort of awareness is absent. Since May 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has signed deals worth billions of dollars to build and run nuclear power reactors in a number of Mideast states, even as AREVA projects in Europe suffer from skilled personnel shortages. And in a June 2008 speech on energy policy, Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, called for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors in the United States by 2030 and the eventual completion of 100 reactors, a goal significantly more ambitious than the cautious figures offered by Energy and the optimistic ones from NEI. So long as political objectives fail to take economic realities into account, the risk of demand distortion and the bullwhip effect will loom over the nuclear industry.