According to the remarks made by the Honourable Peter B. Lyons, Commissioner from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power (ICAPP’08), ‘Creating, sustaining, and growing a population of educated, trained, and experienced personnel from which the nuclear industry need to recruit in order to accomplish their goals is a challenge among government, industry, and academia’.

It is widely recognized that national development in the nuclear industry requires a scientific and technological infrastructure. Such an infrastructure is mainly found in:

• National and private research and development (R&D) institutes

• Institutes and laboratories for standardization and calibration

• Higher education institutions

• Vocational schools for practitioners and professional training centres

• Scientific academies and professional associations

• National industry.

All these organizations create knowledge in one way or another but three of them are particularly important: R&D institutes, higher educational insti­tutions and vocational schools.