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The complexity of the nuclear fuel cycle, reactor operations, used fuel disposal and plant decommissioning ensures that the industry provides work for a significant number of companies, characterized as providers of technology, equipment and specialized services. Many of these are serving several industrial sectors with similar requirements, but others are heavily concentrated in nuclear.
At the front end of the fuel cycle, the current investment boom in both uranium mines and enrichment facilities is providing a lot of work. Uranium mining is little different from other mining operations, so the suppliers tend to be the general mining equipment vendors (diggers, large trucks, processing plants) but centrifuge enrichment is technologically complex and requires very high quality metals and other materials. Transport of nuclear materials, including radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine and agriculture, is a very specialized area but vital for the industry.
Nuclear plants themselves provide opportunities for specialized suppliers of valves, gauges, pipework, control equipment, safety and detection systems. With concerns about possible nuclear terrorism, security has been tightened at all nuclear facilities, including manned security. As the industry is mature in a technical sense, many suppliers have long, historical relationships with the reactor vendors, the architect-engineering companies which work with them and the major contractors. The possibility of new nuclear build in many markets now suggests that new specialists will emerge, not part of the previous boom in nuclear construction.
The back end of the nuclear fuel cycle includes a lots of activity associated with nuclear wastes. Most nuclear waste (by volume) is not highly radioactive, such a workers overalls and materials lightly contaminated, but must be handled carefully and sensibly disposed of. The higher radioactivity waste is small in volume but is taken care of by specialist companies, prior to decisions being taken on national deep repositories.
Finally, the decommissioning of nuclear facilities is now a huge business. In the United Kingdom alone, over $150 billion will be spent over the next decades in decommissioning facilities dating from the 1950s and not designed with economy in returning the sites to other uses much in mind. Although it is generally expected that most current operating reactors will now run for many years, there will be selected further shutdowns to add to the decommissioning bill. Much of the work today, however, relates to the nuclear experimentation of the 1950s and 1960s, much of it for military reasons.
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