Rolls Royce, the global power systems company, made an announcement last month about the opening of two University Technology Centres – Centres of Excellence – dedicated to nuclear technology at the Imperial College London and the University of Manchester. This was indeed good news for the people around the world who believe in the capabilities of nuclear energy for generating safe, clean, and affordable electricity that will help secure a low-carbon future. Optimistically, this could very well be a trendsetter for energizing smart companies to collaborate with the universities in their jurisdictions to create and foster centres of excellence dedicated to nuclear technology.

These centres of excellence at the universities of the Imperial College London and the University of Manchester are long-term funded collaborations between Rolls Royce and academics on new nuclear projects that ensure continuity of work, offering high-quality technology for the company and real-world challenges for academic partners. These centres will serve as nuclear hubs for excellence with the focus on material properties, modelling of nuclear plant processes and safety and reliability, with applications in both civil and naval nuclear power.

Both universities are world-class academics and research teams with particular capabilities in nuclear science and engineering with the commitment to work in close collaboration with Rolls Royce. These universities provide access to specialized skills and equipment with the adequate research capabilities that compliment Rolls Royce commitment to the training and development of the next generation of skilled people in the field of nuclear industry.

Here are the core competencies of each partner that contributed to the partnerships:

• Rolls Royce:
  

  At Rolls Royce, the focus is on providing utility customers with integrated, long-term support services across the reactor lifecycle, covering safety, licensing and environmental activities; component design, manufacture and supply; in-service support and plant life extension; as well as nuclear Instrumentation and Controls supply and safety.
  

Under their market sector, Civil Nuclear, Rolls-Royce is committed to providing customers with nuclear support services spanning the reactor lifecycle, from concept design through to life extension. Moreover, Rolls-Royce is a world-leader in nuclear submarine systems and support services incorporating design, procurement and operation.

Currently Rolls-Royce is leading the development of the UK’s Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Centre (NAMRC) that will bring together an industrial consortium of around 30 companies from the UK nuclear supply chain. University partners will lead key research themes.

• Imperial College London:
  

  The impact of the research at Imperial is global, from hand pumps in Africa, to the world’s fastest train in Shanghai. The expertise of Imperial researchers reaches across the planet and beyond. The next major advance in mathematics or medicine, the natural sciences or engineering, might well begin right at Imperial. The long history of Imperial graduates’ accomplishments includes the discoveries of penicillin, holography, and helium and innovations such as the maglev train and robotic surgery.
  

   

  The Centre of Excellence at Imperial will provide a focal point for academics from the Faculty of Engineering and Rolls-Royce to further research in both nuclear civil power and submarines. They will focus research in a range of areas including improving fuel performance, so that reactors can run more efficiently, and developing better methods for monitoring the performance of nuclear reactors, which are constantly subjected to harsh conditions such as radiation and extreme temperatures.
  

   

  The Centre will act as a conduit for students interested in a career in the nuclear industry, giving them better access to experts, industrial facilities and summer placements at Rolls-Royce. The Centre is located in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, drawing on the expertise of academics from across the Faculty including the Departments of Materials, Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology, Earth Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.
  

• University of Manchester:
  

  The University of Manchester has set out ambitious plans encapsulated in its 2015 Vision to become one of the world’s leading academic institutions, ranked in the global top 25. Nuclear research has been identified by the university as one of its major growth disciplines building.
  

   

  The University already has the UK’s largest concentration of nuclear research, training and educational activities and in 2005 formed the Dalton Nuclear Institute to drive forward its ambitions. Over the past few years, the portfolio of nuclear research educational activity has ramped up significantly and now stands at almost £100m over the next few years with 200 researchers involved.
  

   

  The University has state of the art facilities located at Manchester for supporting nuclear R&D such as active radiochemistry and graphite labs, surface analysis equipment, materials testing facilities etc.
  

Professor Tim Abram, Professor in Nuclear Fuel technology, is heading up the Rolls Royce Centre at Manchester. The Centre will underpin the science and engineering requirements of Rolls-Royce and help to develop the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers needed by industry.  It will also allow further exchange of skills between The University and Rolls-Royce and provide new opportunities for training and development.

According to a document, the Concept of Centre of Excellence, research and technological developmental activities are performed at a very high and world-class level as centres of excellence:

• Comprise and attract excellent researchers and developers;
  
• Earn reputation as a significant resource for the progress of science and technology; and
  
• Spread innovation.
  

A centre of excellence, in a simple sense, is defined as a structure where research and technological research is performed of world standard, in terms of measurable scientific production (including training) and/or technological innovation.

The following represent typical attributes of a centre of excellence:

• A “critical mass” of high level scientists and/or technology developers;
  
• A well-identified structure (mostly based on existing structures) having its own research agenda;
  
• Capable of integrating connected fields and to associate complementary skills;
  
• Capable of maintaining a high rate of exchange of qualified human resources;
  
• A dynamic role in the surrounding innovation system (adding value to knowledge);
  
• High levels of international visibility and scientific and/or industrial connectivity;
  
• A reasonable stability of funding and operating conditions over time (the basis for investing in people and building partnerships); and
  
• Sources of finance those are not dependent over time on public funding.
  

The bottomline is that with the industry-university collaborations, students at the universities also stand to benefit, as the centres of excellence help them to prepare for careers in the nuclear industry and give them better access to experts, industrial facilities and employment opportunities. Incidentally, the aim of the participating universities around the world who are investing their time and energy into this type of centres of excellence is to make sure that there is a growing pool of skilled and qualified people that is available to match the growing opportunities in the national and international nuclear industry.

The traditional role of the universities has always been for centuries to provide the professional training for high-level jobs by teaching appropriate disciplines and help increase the body of theoretical knowledge as well as its application to practical problems by conducting research. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some progressive thinkers like Derek Bok, then-president of Harvard University and author of books on the subject of higher education, wanted to transform universities from being underutilized weapon in the battle for industrial competitiveness and regional growth to institutions with civic duty to ally itself closely with industry to improve productivity. This message revolutionized universities around the world to design research centres with the focus to attract corporate funding and technology transfer facilities and centres for excellence became the pre-eminent research-to-commercialize vehicles that offer enormous financial benefits.

The concept of applied research was not new to the universities but it was redefined to promote increasing role of universities for taking risk, being innovative, securing highly specialized knowledge, and becoming transdisciplinary to meet major challenges of society. This led to the creation of science parks, incubators, and spin offs all over the map, attracting billions of dollars in corporate and government funding and producing countless success stories around the world. At the same time, unfortunately, this gigantic success became subject to criticism and raised some concerns. Richard Florida in his article, The Role of University: Leveraging Talent, No Technology, presented views of the stakeholders who had expressed concerns about the impact of the success. Accordingly:

• University: It was suggested that universities may well have gone too far as academics and university official were becoming increasingly concerned that greater involvement in university research is causing a shift from fundamental science to more applied work;
  
• Industry: Industry, meanwhile, is growing upset over universities’ increasingly aggressive attempts to profit from industry-funded research, through intellectual property rights; and
  
• Government: State and local governments are becoming disillusioned that universities are not sparking the kind of regional growth seen in the classic success stories of Stanford University and Silicon Valley in California and of MIT and the Route 128 beltway around Boston.
  

In spite of growing concerns, the academic culture of the universities – geared towards production of knowledge, scientific excellence, academic freedom, and free dissemination of results – continues to change to the business culture – geared towards production of wealth, profitability, and application of results. Consequently, successful universities are moving away from a government-controlled business model to towards increased autonomy but difference in nature and magnitude of changes.

A Review of the UK’s Nuclear R&D Capability, a recent report prepared by the Dalton Nuclear Institute (University of Manchester) along with other sponsoring organizations, projected a market valued at around £600 billion for new nuclear build and £250 billion for decommissioning, waste treatment and disposal, the predicted resurgence in the nuclear market over the next 20 years. This indeed represents unparalleled opportunities in the area of nuclear engineering and its associated technologies around the world that should give universities another reason for focusing on using nuclear centres of excellence as vehicles of commercialization to support their business models.

mirali@aimamc.com