Sizewell C has awarded a four-year contract to Boccard UK to deliver the project's Pools, Tanks and Sumps scope, with manufacturing carried out at Boccard's factory in Deeside, north Wales, the developer confirmed this month. The contract covers fabrication and pre-assembly of high-integrity stainless steel tanks that will be embedded within reinforced concrete structures across Sizewell C's Nuclear Island, work that draws on more than 200 specialists and additional engineering support from Boccard's teams in France.

Boccard already runs a 10,000 square metre digital manufacturing site in Deeside built specifically for nuclear work, alongside a facility at Airbus Broughton where it manufactures components for Hinkley Point C. The Deeside site opened creating over 200 permanent positions, and the new Sizewell C scope adds to a growing book of long-term nuclear contracts the company is building across both live projects.

Why it matters

This is a useful corrective to how the Sizewell C jobs story usually gets told. Coverage of the project tends to focus on the Suffolk construction site itself, but a large share of the actual manufacturing, and the jobs that go with it, sits in specialist fabrication shops hundreds of miles away. Deeside is already established as a nuclear manufacturing hub through its Hinkley Point C work, and this contract confirms that pattern will deepen as Sizewell C's own build programme ramps up over the next four years.

It also reflects a broader shift in how the UK's nuclear pipeline is being resourced. With Hinkley Point C now well into construction and Sizewell C ramping behind it, and small modular reactor programmes adding further demand, contractors serving the sector are investing in permanent, purpose-built manufacturing capacity rather than one-off site mobilisation. That is a different hiring pattern to a typical major infrastructure job: longer-term, factory-based, and increasingly concentrated in specific regional clusters like north Wales and the West Country.

What it means for careers and hiring

For QSs, project managers and engineers with nuclear or high-integrity fabrication experience, Deeside is now a genuine alternative to chasing site-based roles in Suffolk or Somerset. Mechanical and welding engineering managers with pressure vessel or ASME/ISO nuclear-grade fabrication backgrounds are in particular demand, as are quality and compliance specialists who understand the documentation burden that comes with Nuclear Island components. Commercial roles on contracts like this one tend to sit closer to manufacturing and supply chain management than traditional site QS work, which is worth knowing if your experience is in fabrication-heavy sectors like oil and gas or defence rather than conventional construction.

The wider signal for the market is that nuclear new build is no longer a single-site story. Anyone building a CV around the sector should be looking at the fabrication and manufacturing supply chain, not just the headline construction contractors, because that is increasingly where the multi-year, well-funded roles are being created.