Position: Reactor Island Principal Engineer

Location: Renaissance House, Warrington

Work Pattern: Hybrid role with a mix of remote and site/office-based work. 

Attendance occasionally required for site visits, design reviews and client meetings, mainly within the Northwest region. 

Please note this requirement can be worked on either a contract basis (inside IR35) or on a permanent basis

NUVIA UK's Technical Services & Consulting department is fast growing with hybrid opportunities available up and down the country. We're striving to create a multidisciplinary team to offer our clients the best range of talent.

This is an exciting and challenging role where you will perform the Reactor Island Principal Engineer role on the SMR project from Concept Design through to Detailed Design.  Providing one of our leading clients with strong leadership as the Intelligent Customer for Reactor Island, acting as the single point for the discipline across SMR engineering projects. You will be responsible for technical delivery of the tasks and technical interactions with the technical partner and Owner’s Engineer, setting scopes and issue task orders, ensuring alignment with technical standards, project goals and regulatory expectations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the reactor island design and core neutronics programme for the SMR Reactor Island, covering normal operation, transients and fault conditions.
• Act as the “intelligent customer” for reactor physics deliverables from the Technology Partner, providing informed challenge, clarification and acceptance recommendations.
• Own the development, review and integration of reactor physics models, methods and assumptions (e.g. core design, reactivity control, shielding, burnup, kinetics, in‑core monitoring) to ensure a robust, traceable technical baseline.
• Define and maintain the reactor physics design and performance requirements, margins and acceptance criteria, ensuring alignment with overall Reactor Island and plant-level safety and performance objectives.
• Provide reactor physics requirements and technical input to specifications for key core and fuel-related systems, components and instrumentation.
• Provide reactor physics input to the safety case and licensing activities (e.g. fuel and core chapters, safety analysis, fault studies), ensuring consistency between design assumptions, analysis and claims.
• Support responses to regulator questions and technical queries relating to reactivity control, core behaviour, shutdown performance, fuel and core limits, and associated margins.
• Ensure reactor physics analysis and documentation comply with relevant UK and international standards, codes, ONR expectations and internal nuclear safety principles.
• Contribute to ALARP demonstrations and identification of reasonably practicable improvements arising from reactor physics insights.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience required:

• Considerable experience within the UK nuclear industry at all stages of the project lifecycle or academia leading challenging technical projects Function as Intelligent Customer (IC)
• Detailed knowledge and experience within a physics discipline required in the nuclear industry such as transient analysis, reactor physics, shielding, thermal hydraulics etc.
• Ability to assimilate, analyse and provide judgements on complex technical issues clearly and concisely
• Experience with benchmarking, verification & validation, uncertainty quantification and QA‑governed modelling processes.
• Ability to manage major technical work packages, monitor progress, address technical risks and maintain strong configuration and quality management.
• Experience working across multidisciplinary engineering environments to ensure integrated, coherent reactor physics inputs into wider Reactor Island design.
• Ability to write clear, structured technical reports and contribute to safety case documentation.
• Familiar with nuclear safety assessments and safety case construction 
• Good commercial awareness and how to effectively solve client issues in a commercially competitive environment
• Independent and collaborative problem‑solving ability, with a proactive approach to technical issues and opportunities.
• Experience interacting with regulators and senior stakeholders
• Good communication skills and ability to work with other team members
• Comfortable working under time and cost constraints.

Qualifications:

• Degree or postgraduate qualification in Nuclear Engineering, Physics or related discipline.
• Chartered Engineer or Chartered Physicist preferred.
• Must be able to obtain UK Security Clearance