While effective management is critical for any type of project, it is even more necessary for nuclear power plant projects. Integrated nuclear energy project management helps identify some areas of differentiation from conventional projects: security, license management, and quality management

Effective project management is critical for any kind of project, and this has been highlighted by organizations, companies, and authors. The nuclear industry has experienced significant deviations in time and budget compliance for recent nuclear constructions in Europe and USA. Unfortunately, one contributing factor to these deviations has been ineffective project management.

This article emphasizes the importance of applying sound and integrated project management of nuclear projects, by synchronizing all the management areas involved. Besides, the article identifies some differentiating areas with respect to conventional projects, which are basically nuclear safety, licensing management, and quality management.

Project management
The need for consistent and thorough project management for any kind of project has been demonstrated extensively worldwide. The requirement to have qualified and skilled human resources to deploy for the project management functions has been emphasized in all industrial, commercial and social applications. The large projects complexity creates many challenges to achieve the full project scope safely, in quality, in time and in budget, with the focus to eliminate impacting delays and extras in the economic budget.

These complexities and challenges are particularly applicable to the engineering and construction of nuclear power plants, which add to the projects some additional elements that differentiate it from the project management of conventional projects, due to the resulting ionizing radiation and radioactive materials.

Current experiences in nuclear project management
The recent experiences in the construction of nuclear power plants in Europe and the USA have shown some management shortcomings that led to significant delays of several years with respect to the original plans and to extra costs that significantly increased the original budget. These plants suffered difficulties and conflicts with the licensing authorities, the owner operators, the main contractors and the key participants in the supply chain.[...]

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