Risk

Turning the pages of a newsletter from UKAEA this morning, I came across AtkinsRéalis in connection with the design of something called the tritium processing facility, apparently an important ingredient of a fusion fuel cycle.

I picked up on this because Atkins used to be a serious, Epsom based, engineering company, started and built up by the chap who became Sir William Atkins, but now owned by the Canadian company SNC-Lavalin. Old gentlemen in our road sometimes name drop by talking of some lunch they had had with Sir William, probably in the dim and distant past.

SNV-Lavalin appears to have been into roads, railways and bridges, as per reference 2, but Bing suggests that they have now been rebranded as AtkinsRéalis, doing about 30% of their business in the UK and another 30% in Canada.

Turning to their glossily illustrated annual report, I found their top table, snapped above. Three ladies, but no-one of colour, although plenty of such are to be seen elsewhere in the report. I particularly noticed a Chief Risk Officer, albeit at the bottom right of the top table, which I don't think is a job title that one would have seen in such a company until fairly recently, much more the sort of role that banks and insurance companies went in for. Although, to be fair, in my days of inspecting IT projects for what was then the strangely titled Office for Government Commerce, risk registers were all the thing. If your project did not have an Excel workbook with these words in its file name, you more or less automatically scored a red. Action this day by project sponsor stuff.

The good news is that UKAEA seems to be chugging forward on the fusion front. Although it also seems that I will be doing well if I live to see fusion power in action!

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_(company).

Reference 2: https://portfolio.snclavalin.com/fr/. 

Reference 3: https://www.atkinsrealis.com/.