Beyond the Megawatt: How Nuclear Energy Is Building Asia’s Next Engineering Generation
On 4 February 2018, Md. Mahmudun Nobi reported for his first day at Nuclear Power Plant Company Bangladesh Limited. He had left a teaching post at Engineering University School & College, on the campus of BUET, where he had spent his days explaining the principles of physics to undergraduates. The NPCBL vacancy, when he saw it, seemed to align with something he had carried for a long time – a physicist’s ambition to be present at the beginning of something large. The selection process was demanding: written exams, oral interviews, security clearances. He got through.
What followed was an education that had no precedent in Bangladesh, because the profession it was training him for had no precedent in Bangladesh. He completed coursework in reactor engineering at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission’s Training Institute. He studied nuclear energy fundamentals in Mumbai. He spent more than thirteen months in Russia on a programme in training management. When he returned to Rooppur, the nuclear power plant being built by Russia’s Rosatom, he joined the plant’s Training Centre as a radiation safety instructor, helped build a dosimetry laboratory, and contributed to developing a simulator for personnel response to radiological emergencies.
Today, as Rooppur approaches first criticality, Nobi holds the position of Senior Assistant Manager at NPCBL, a senior scientist on the construction project, and acting head of the General Training Division. The plant is not yet generating electricity. But it has already produced something that will outlast its first fuel cycle: a generation of Bangladeshi nuclear professionals who did not exist before it was built.
That is the real story of nuclear development in emerging Asia and Rooppur is its sharpest illustration.
A new consensus is forming across Southeast Asia and the numbers back it up. According to the World Nuclear Association’s latest World Nuclear Outlook, Southeast Asia is projected to account for nearly a quarter of the 157 gigawatts expected to be generated by “new nuclear nations” by mid-century. This isn’t a distant forecast. It reflects decisions being made right now: agreements signed, sites surveyed, and – most consequentially – people being trained.
King Lee, WNA’s Head of Policy and Industry Engagement, was quoted recently by the Associated Press as saying that amid a renewed global energy crisis and surging demand for clean, reliable power, there is “a more serious, new and growing momentum for nuclear energy in Southeast Asia.” Across the ASEAN region, the question has shifted from whether nuclear belongs in the energy mix to how quickly it can be responsibly deployed.
One nuclear power plant needs somewhere between 500 and 1,000 permanent, highly skilled workers. During construction, that number swells to 20,000. These figures appear often in policy documents and investment briefs but they miss what’s actually interesting about what’s happening across Asia right now.
The countries building or planning nuclear plants aren’t just solving an electricity problem. They’re doing something harder and stranger: trying to scale, within a generation, entire professional classes that existed only in embryonic form. A handful of reactor physicists at a research institute is not the same as an operational nuclear workforce. A radiation safety officer at a hospital is not a plant inspector. The difference between having a few dozen specialists and having a self-sustaining nuclear industry is the work of a generation – and that work is now underway.
That shift – from energy policy to talent policy, often within the same government document, the same bilateral agreement, the same contractor negotiation – is the real story of nuclear development in emerging Asia.
Nuclear energy is unusual in how far upstream the workforce problem begins. Training pipelines typically run five to ten years ahead of a plant’s commissioning date. Once someone enters the sector, they tend to stay for three or four decades. This isn’t a workforce you can recruit off the shelf or retrain from an adjacent industry. You have to grow it – deliberately, expensively, and early.
That timeline forces a kind of long-range thinking that most governments find uncomfortable. Decisions about education and training are being made today for plants that won’t operate until the mid-2030s, staffed by professionals whose careers will run to 2060 or beyond. The political cycles that govern most infrastructure spending – four years, maybe five – simply don’t map onto this.
The countries that navigate this well tend to be the ones that treat workforce development not as a downstream consequence of the energy decision, but as a precondition for it. Vietnam learned this, arguably the hard way.
In the mid-2010s, Vietnam suspended its nuclear ambitions. The economics had shifted. What’s striking, in retrospect, is what the country kept doing anyway: training specialists, maintaining international partnerships, sending students abroad, sustaining the institutional infrastructure of a nuclear programme even when there was no programme to speak of.
To understand why that mattered, it helps to look back further – across four decades of Soviet and then Russian cooperation that began in the 1980s. The centrepiece of that partnership is the Dalat Nuclear Research Reactor, refurbished with Soviet assistance and restarted in 1984. Today, Dalat remains the backbone of Vietnam’s nuclear medicine sector, producing roughly 80% of the country’s radiopharmaceuticals – isotopes used in cancer diagnostics and treatment that touch the lives of patients every day. It is a powerful demonstration of what sustained nuclear cooperation can deliver beyond the energy sector.
That long partnership also produced a deep bench of Vietnamese scientists, engineers, and technicians who came up through joint research programmes, studied at Russian universities, and built careers in institutions shaped by decades of bilateral exchange. When Vietnam suspended its reactor ambitions, that community didn’t disappear. It kept working, kept learning, kept the institutional memory alive.
By 2025, when the nuclear agenda re-emerged with new agreements signed and new reactors under consideration, Vietnam wasn’t starting from scratch. The workforce development had preceded the plant by decades, not years. A partnership tested by time had proved its worth precisely when it was needed most.
The recent agreement with Russia deepened this further. Hundreds of Vietnamese specialists are now being trained across the full chain: engineering, construction, plant management, regulatory oversight. Joint training centres are being established domestically. The logic is straightforward, even if the scale is ambitious: you cannot build a nuclear industry on the back of a few hundred foreign-educated specialists. You have to build the institutions that keep producing them.
Bangladesh’s Rooppur plant – two 1,200-megawatt units, $12.65 billion in total investment – is, by any measure, a large bet for a country at Bangladesh’s stage of development. But the more interesting number isn’t the investment figure.
While the plant was being built, approximately 1,263 Bangladeshi specialists completed training and practical experience at Rosatom facilities. Of those, 817 have already completed the required preparation at Rosatom’s Technical Academy and joined the project team. These are not people studying nuclear engineering in the abstract. They are trained for specific roles in a specific facility that will be operational within their working lifetimes.
Md. Mahmudun Nobi is one of them. His trajectory captures what this investment actually looks like at the individual level: a physics teacher who became a reactor training specialist, who built training infrastructure that did not exist, who will now help operate and oversee a plant that will generate power for decades. When Rooppur comes online, the people running it, inspecting it, and regulating it will largely be Bangladeshis who did not have that option a decade ago.
What Rooppur has done, in effect, is use a single infrastructure project to bootstrap an entire professional domain. Nuclear engineering, radiation safety, regulatory science – these fields now exist in Bangladesh in a way they simply didn’t before. The plant is the curriculum; Rosatom’s training infrastructure is the faculty. And first criticality, when it comes, will mark not just a milestone in Bangladesh’s energy history, but the moment a new professional generation comes into its own.
Indonesia’s nuclear situation is more complicated, and in some ways more instructive. The country hasn’t committed to building a reactor yet: small modular reactors are under consideration as the first step with large capacity also in the national plan, various sites have been studied, and the policy conversation goes back decades. But workforce planning is already embedded in national strategy.
This isn’t because Indonesia faces a shortage of candidates. With a large, young, and increasingly well-educated population, the pipeline of people capable of working in nuclear-related fields is reasonably healthy. Graduates in relevant disciplines tend to be absorbed by institutions like BRIN, the national research agency, PT PLN, the state electricity company, BAPETEN, the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency, and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. The expertise base exists.
What’s holding Indonesia back has less to do with human capital than with financing structures, geopolitical calculations, and the institutional inertia that accumulates around any decision of this scale. The workforce problem, when Indonesia eventually makes its move, will be real but manageable. The harder problems are elsewhere.
Perhaps the most instructive story is Myanmar’s. An economy operating under significant external economic pressure – including trade restrictions from a number of Western states – is nonetheless actively preparing for small modular reactor deployment under a 2025 intergovernmental agreement with Russia. Specialists are being sent to Russian technical universities and nuclear research centres. Domestic training programmes are in development.
The underlying principle Myanmar’s approach illustrates is significant: peaceful nuclear technology should be accessible to all nations, not reserved for those already at the front of the industrial queue. For lower-income countries with limited existing industrial capacity, nuclear energy represents one of the few sectors where participating in an advanced technology programme is genuinely accessible – because the vendor packages the workforce development into the deal. You don’t have to have a nuclear engineering faculty before you sign the contract. The contract comes with one.
This is, in the broadest sense, technological leapfrogging: using a single large external commitment to pull domestic capacity forward, rather than waiting for it to develop organically. Myanmar’s determination to pursue an atomic future despite trade pressures from some quarters is a testament to that logic and a signal that nuclear cooperation is increasingly seen as a sovereign development choice, not a geopolitical favour.
Southeast Asia’s nuclear ambitions don’t exist in isolation. The countries of the region are connected by an institutional framework that increasingly treats nuclear energy as a collective challenge and opportunity.
ASEAN and its affiliated bodies – including the ASEAN Centre for Energy – have made nuclear literacy a regular feature of regional dialogue. Workshops, technical seminars, and roundtables held under ASEAN auspices bring together energy ministers, regulatory officials, and technical experts from across the membership, enabling the sharing of best practices on safety standards, regulatory frameworks, and workforce approaches. Countries further ahead in their nuclear programmes serve as practical reference points for those still in the planning phase.
This regional architecture matters for more than coordination. It signals that nuclear energy in Southeast Asia is being developed within a framework of collective accountability – one where neighbours compare notes, regulators build shared standards, and the region moves, however unevenly, toward a common understanding of what responsible nuclear development looks like.
India’s nuclear story is at a different phase entirely. With more than 20 operating reactors and a comprehensive domestic training infrastructure anchored by institutions like the Homi Bhabha National Institute, the country has moved past the capacity-building stage. The question for India now is not how to develop nuclear expertise, but what to do with it.
The answer, increasingly, is to export it. India is positioning itself as a potential provider of both technology and trained personnel to other developing nuclear programmes across the region. The decades of internal investment are beginning to generate external returns.
One of the quieter but more consequential developments in Asian nuclear energy is the degree to which workforce development has become central to vendor competition. Nuclear contracts used to be primarily about reactor technology and financing. They still are – but training packages have become a significant differentiating factor.
Russia, through Rosatom, has the most established and scaled operation: state-sponsored programmes, affiliated universities, dedicated training facilities. Thousands of foreign students have passed through Russian nuclear education institutions over the past two decades, creating alumni networks that extend across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The depth of that investment – visible in Rooppur, in Dalat, in the Vietnamese specialists now entering mid-career – illustrates what long-term technical partnership actually looks like in practice.
China is expanding its training offer alongside its technology exports, particularly in Southeast Asia. South Korea has built training relationships through projects like the Barakah plant in the UAE. France contributes through EDF and the CEA. Japan focuses on safety training and technical cooperation.
The cumulative effect is that nuclear workforce development has become a form of soft power – one that operates on very long timescales. The relationships formed during training tend to persist long after the formal agreements expire.
None of this is without risk, and the optimistic framing that surrounds nuclear human capital development sometimes papers over genuine problems.
Brain drain is the most obvious. Highly trained nuclear specialists are internationally mobile and internationally in demand. A country that invests heavily in training people may find that those people leave – not out of disloyalty, but because better opportunities exist elsewhere. Retention mechanisms are not always well-designed or well-funded.
Over-reliance on foreign education systems creates a different problem. Sending students abroad is efficient in the short term, but it doesn’t build the domestic institutional capacity needed to sustain a nuclear programme across multiple generations. Local universities have to be able to produce nuclear engineers too – and scaling that kind of programme is genuinely hard.
There is also the competition problem. Nuclear energy competes for talent with every other fast-growing sector in these economies: technology, finance, infrastructure, manufacturing. A career in nuclear operations may be stable and well-paid, but it may not be as attractive as alternatives that offer faster advancement or more geographic flexibility. Institutional support only goes so far if the career proposition isn’t compelling.
If current trajectories continue, Asia in 2040 will have tens of thousands of nuclear-trained professionals spread across programmes at very different stages of maturity. Some countries will have moved from construction to operation. Others will be entering the construction phase that others are now completing. Regional training hubs may have emerged – institutions serving multiple national programmes and facilitating cross-border professional mobility.
The countries that invested early and consistently in workforce development will have something that cannot be easily replicated: accumulated institutional knowledge, professional networks, and educational infrastructure that take a long time to build and are very hard to import.
Md. Mahmudun Nobi describes Rooppur not as a project but as a part of his life. What began as a dream, he has said, became a responsibility – to his country, to his profession, and to the future of nuclear energy in Bangladesh. That sentence, spoken by one man about one plant, captures something that transcends the individual case. Nuclear energy in emerging Asia is, in the end, a bet on people as much as on technology. The megawatts matter. But the engineers, inspectors, regulators, and scientists who will run these programmes for the next forty years may prove to be the more durable and more consequential output.
Philip Gunawardena
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