HA NOI — A fund of VND3 trillion (US$154 million) is to be put aside to train staff for nation's first nuclear power plant in central Ninh Thuan Province, due to be built between 2014 and 2020.
Vuong Huu Tan, chairman of the Viet Nam Atomic Energy Institute, one of the agencies that took part in compiling the training proposal, said the manpower was to be ready when the plant was completed.
"The important thing is we have a clear human resources plan to follow and, under the proposal, a National Standing Committee, chaired by a deputy minister, will be set up to ensure everything runs on track."
It required six academic institutions to educate 240 engineers and 35 graduates with master or PhD degrees specialising in nuclear power each year.
As many as 20 of these 240 engineers and 15 of the 35 masters or PhD students would acquire their degrees abroad.
In the areas of atomic energy research and application, nuclear security and safety it was anticipated that 65 engineers and 35 master or PhD degree holders would be trained in this field. Half of them would be sent abroad for study.
For the next five years, about two-thirds of the VND2 trillion (US$102 million) would be spent on a number of objectives including establishing preferential policies for students and people working in the atomic energy field, international exchanges of experiences in human resources training, investment in improving educational infrastructure, building international standards curriculums and running capacity enhancing programmes for teaching staff.
The remaining fund would be spent during the period 2015-20 to strengthen the education framework and review performances during the first five years.
During the first phase, five universities would provide training, including Ha Noi National University's College of Science, HCM City National University's College of Science, Ha Noi University of Science and Technology and Viet Nam Atomic Energy Institute's Training Centre.
Tan said the proposal would set out the arching framework and each university would customise to suit its own circumstance.
He said the motivation of this proposal was the severe manpower shortage in the atomic energy field.
Ministry of Education and Training statistics in 2008 showed there were only 505 graduates from universities with atomic energy-related majors.
Among them, the number of experts with PhD degrees was 65, with an average age of 50. This underscored the need to create a generation of experts by the time the nuclear power plant came into operation.
Tran Kim Tuan, director of Ha Noi University of Science and Technology's Institute of Nuclear Engineering and Environmental Physics, said the financial support would help to address several issues that were hindering training quality.
One of them was the need to purchase modern scientific equipment for laboratories, given the great importance of experiments in the training process.
"Unlike in other fields, which can allow new engineers to have on-the-job training to a large extent, nuclear engineers are required to have a higher readiness before entering the workplace," Tuan said.
As of now, machines used in the laboratories mainly came from donations from Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s.
"After long use, the degradation of machines is unavoidable. We had a project supported by the agency in 2006 and used a $300,000 loan from the World Bank to purchase more equipment but its just a small proportion of what's really needed."
Tuan was also concerned about the quality of lecturers, half of whom were young and didn't have much experience in nuclear power.
"We hope that with the increasing number of new funds, young lecturers can receive advanced training from highly developed countries," he said.
The institute was also trying to persuade its alumni, who had already finished their doctoral programmes abroad, to return home.
"We (the alumni) alone can't do it, we need the support of a solid system of preferential incentives that are attractive enough for them to consider."
Tuan said the backbone of the teaching curriculum was based on Russian textbooks and was updated with curriculums taught in universities in the US and the UK and other countries with highly developed nuclear technology.
For this academic year, the institute has enrolled 40 students and is co-operating with the Programme for Excellent Engineers in Viet Nam to train 15 high quality engineers in this field. — VNS
