The vision for Sellafield going forward, by CEO Martin Chown

At the helm of it is Chief Executive Officer Martin Chown, a man whose key mission is to make the site ‘the best that it can be’ for all who work there.

Martin took over leadership of Sellafield in 2020 and is overseeing it through a key period of change with £4billion of capital build on the site. Despite its challenges and pressures, Martin thinks his role at Britain’s biggest nuclear site is ‘fantastic’.

He says: “It’s a challenging role, it’s different every day and every week and there is always an awful lot going on and I absolutely love my job, I think it’s a fantastic job.

“I love working with all of our teams, all of our people and everybody in the community who supports us in terms of what we do.

“I like the difficulty of it, the challenge of it, trying to make Sellafield the best it can be.”

Among the many challenges his stand out moment so far has been the work they completed around Magnox.  “I think the way we finished reprocessing at Magnox. We released a film,  I thought that was one of the highlights. It’s probably unusual to say the ending of something is a highlight, but the way we did it and the way we brought our workforce to talk about their lived experience and how they got an immense pride in what they do. If we can capture that and get people to perform at their best and then do something else and feel positive about that, which is the way we did it, I just think that’s a fantastic thing.”

His career path to Sellafield started out in a way that many in West Cumbria can relate to, working on the shop floor as an apprentice before moving through the ranks in a number of key industries, both in the UK and further afield.

Martin says: “I left school and I started off in an apprenticeship, I studied part time at college and then university. I started off working on the shop floor as an apprentice, a mechanical fitter and I did more commercial roles - I was doing buying, procurement, so I went into a more office-based job and I worked in automotive, pharmaceutical and construction, three big industries.

“I have always worked in large organisations so that’s why it helps coming into Sellafield, leading Sellafield, I have got that experience, but I started off working nightshifts two weeks of days, two weeks of nights on a shop floor.”

He says his experience can often help him understand some of the challenges those on the ground at Sellafield face in their work.

“I spend a lot of time with our people who are carrying out nuclear operations at Sellafield and our construction staff. I have a great deal of empathy for what they do and going out sometimes for outdoor work in all weathers or working in nuclear plants and the difficulties that involves. I have worked in similar environments myself," he says.

“I understand their work, what they do and I am happy to talk to them about the challenges they face.”

It’s been a varied career and something many people do not know about him, even colleagues, is that he used to be an ambulance driver. “One of the things I have done in my career is I used to be a part-time volunteer ambulance driver as well, so I have driven an ambulance with the blue lights on with someone in the back several times, I have lifted patients who are in trouble into the back of my ambulance and transported them.”

Back to the day job, Sellafield has a number of key missions in the near future, with Martin saying a key aim is to improve pace on the plant, on what he says is still a ‘growing site’.

“It’s a fantastic time at Sellafield, we stopped reprocessing last year and we are changing what we do, so we want to repackage the old legacy material as we call it at Sellafield into high integrity containers and that’s our big mission, as well as fuel and others for many, many years to come. We need to get a lot better and faster at doing that, so it’s getting the whole site working towards that and that ultimately reduces all the risk at Sellafield once we are able to do that,” he says.

“So, getting better, more predictable and doing that at pace is really important, but that’s a huge engineering mission. Sellafield is still growing, we are still employing more people now, we have got about 11,500 people and we are taking on more graduates and apprentices now than we ever have done so we are still growing. We will recruit more over the next two years and then we will remain about the same size for many years.”

With new nuclear projects on the horizon, he thinks the introduction of Small Modular reactors in the county can only be an asset to both the site and Cumbria as a whole.

He says: “We do play a role in supporting other new nuclear but if a small modular reactor, Rolls Royce or others, was available we would certainly work with them and we would certainly want to use the power for our site as well, so having one in Cumbria is an advantage for us and with the work and skills we have got in the area it is definitely something we would like to support.”

Throughout the interview, it was clear to see the strong sense of pride felt by Martin for the organisation, one he thinks should be shared by the whole community in Cumbria, for the power of the site not only on a local but national scale.

“We are one of the largest industrial sites in the UK, we are also one of the largest construction sites. We have currently got over £4 billion of capital build on the site and so in both nuclear and construction we are an enormous company, we support over 42,000 around the UK in our supply chain.

“In Cumbria I hope people realise we are alongside companies such as HS2, Grangemouth, all of the other big industrial companies. Sellafield is right in the top group, so I think it’s a real national asset that we have got at Sellafield and everybody in Cumbria should be proud of what we have got, what we do and making the most of it.”

Martin says he is a ‘big believer in getting things done’, but this is also combined with a humility in leadership he learnt in the automotive industry.

Asked what his greatest piece of business advice was, he says: “It’s a chap called Shuhei Toyoda. My automotive experience was with Toyota Motor manufacturing and he was a senior leader in Toyota, but he was also a friend and he helped me in my early career. The advice he gave me was about humility, powerful leadership with humility. It was about you don’t have to be big and brash and bold you can be caring, empathetic and still very powerful as a senior leader and I have taken that throughout my entire career.

“One of the things I say at Sellafield is everybody is just as important as everybody else, our cleaners, our security guards, our nuclear workers, construction workers, press team. Everybody is here to do an important job, so that powerful humility is the biggest lesson I have learned.”