Less than three decades after the infamous meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl rocked the world’s faith in nuclear power, the controversial energy source appears to be regaining its stature as the need to find alternatives to coal becomes increasingly urgent in the face of climate change. Gemma Black reports.

Forsmark is one of Sweden’s ten nuclear powerstations given a new lease on life under a new government policy. As of the beginning of this month, it will also be the world’s first permanent nuclear waste disposal site..

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Homer Simpson presses the right button at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant at which he is safety officer and through sheer dumb luck, prevents a disastrous meltdown from occurring and wins employee of the month. While this particular satire no doubt,exaggerates the potential for human fallibility in nuclear power plants and unfairly represents the safety procedures and technology in today’s nuclear industry, it does strike a chord with the fears of many when it comes to the use of the energy.

“Using an energy source that produces the most dangerous materials known to man is just not a good way to produce electricity,” says Swedish member of parliament and of the Green Party, Per Bolund.

“We know from past experiences that even when you have the best of plans, shit happens. We shouldn’t build ourselves into such a risky system where everything has to work out perfectly in order to be safe for humanity,” he says.

However, do such fears remain valid for today’s nuclear technology, or are they as outdated as the comedy in which they were parodied?

If international policy making is anything to go by, the latter would appear to be true.

Sweden’s U-turn

In February this year the Swedish government overturned a thirty year old policy aimed at phasing out nuclear energy. The reasons given for the decision were energy security and independence, and for Sweden to better meet its 40% emissions reduction target by 2020 – one of the highest targets in the world.

“People now see that the danger of climate change is a bigger risk to human lives than the risks of a nuclear power plant,” says Professor Janne Wallenius, head of reactor physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Bolund, of the Green Party, puts this seemingly renewed trust in nuclear down to nostalgia and the security of the familiar.

“We already have nuclear power and we’ve had it for a long time. It’s always easier to convince people to keep something they already have, rather than bring something new into the system,” he says.

Sweden originally voted to phase out nuclear energy in a 1980 referendum – one year after the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in the United States, and six years before the Chernobyl disaster.

Since then, however, only two of Sweden’s twelve reactors have closed down and the remaining ten continue to provide almost half of the country’s electricity, with the other half coming largely from hydropower.

The Swedish Centre party, a junior member of the ruling coalition, made the change possible by renegotiating their longstanding opposition to nuclear power and therefore providing a majority for the decision.

“The Centre Party has not changed its opinion when it comes to nuclear power, but we can live with the fact that nuclear power will be a part of Swedish electricity production in the foreseeable future,” party leader Maud Olofsson told Sweden’s TT news agency.

The issue will without doubt reappear high on the agenda in the country’s upcoming elections in 2010, as the opposition parties – the Social Democrats, the Left Party, and the Greens – remain anti-nuclear.

“It’s a big problem that the government has decided to just reverse the energy politics in Sweden when it comes to nuclear power, but if there’s a new majority in the next election then the decision will have no meaning at all,” says Bolund.

For Professor Wallenius, however, the decision has had obvious significance.

“For more than 25 years it has been very difficult to do research on nuclear energy in Sweden, and as a result we had very few students coming to the field, so the science of nuclear technology was dying in the country,” he says.

Role of renewables

Professor Wallenius adds that while he feels the government’s previous policy neglected nuclear, it provided renewable energy sources, particularly wind power, excessive funding and attention.

“The present rate of building renewables in Sweden and other European countries is too high. We can see that people are buying wind power technology that is not ready for deployment, and that would never have happened if the market had not been forced to produce a technology which is not ready,” he says.

Rune Birk Nielsen, representing the Danish Wind Industry Association, argues, however, that the success of wind power in Sweden’s neighbouring Denmark, which refuses to implement nuclear energy, is proof enough that it can work.

“In Denmark we have proven that more than 20% of our electricity consumption can come from wind power, so if that’s not proof that it’s ready, I don’t know what is,” he says.

The insurance issue

Nielsen views one of the main set backs of nuclear energy is the problem of insuring the associated risks of production.

“I can’t imagine any insurance company here in Denmark that would insure a power plant; it would be nearly impossible.” he says.

To deal with this issue in Sweden, nuclear power plants are subject to an insurance cap which allows the plants to pay just a small part of the damages in the event of an accident, while the government covers the rest.

According to Bolund, this is a case of uncompetitive funding.

“It is, of course a subsidy to nuclear power, there’s no other way to look at it. It’s a problem because it is no longer an even competition between the different energy sources, and those subsidies take public money away from renewable energy,” he says.

While Wallenius does not support increased funding of renewables, he agrees that the cap is pointless: “It is completely unnecessary; I think we should remove it and the power plants should pay full insurance costs. I don’t see a reason for keeping it,” he says.

Nuclear in the world

Because of Sweden’s policy shift, parallel debates have arisen in Germany to scrap its own phase- out plan. The country’s next elections will tell the outcome of these debates.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also made a similar decision last year to replace aging nuclear plants, despite previous misgivings about the technology, while, at the same time, Finland is in the process of building the biggest reactor in the world.

In a presentation for the Asia Society in New York at the beginning of this month,

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, predicted that, globally, nuclear energy would play a key role in addressing climate change.

“Renewable energy sources and improvements in efficiency won’t come close to meeting the world’s growing energy demand,” he said, referring largely to China’s fast growing energy sector.

According to the World Nuclear Association, a private, pro-nuclear organisation, while 80% of China’s energy comes from coal, it also has eleven commercial nuclear reactors, twelve under construction and another twelve to begin construction this year.

“There’s no quantitative way to get this right without the nuclear industry playing a really large role. It’s not a happy thought, but it’s unavoidable,” Professor Sachs said.

Nielsen, of the Danish Wind Industry Association, disagrees.

“We just need to be clever about it,” he says. “We will of course need to have fossil fuels for the next 30 or 40 years, but in the long run there should be no need for them, and I can’t really see nuclear as anything but a fossil fuel. It is certainly not sustainable, since uranium is not an ever lasting source.”

A special case for Sweden

While many agree that it will be difficult to meet the energy demands of countries like China without the use of nuclear, Bolund argues that on a worldwide scale, Sweden is better equipped than most to rely solely on what he sees as cleaner and safer renewable energy technologies.

“Sweden has probably the best opportunities of all the nuclear dependent countries to phase out our nuclear energy and have fully sustainable energy production,” he says. “We have a lot of hydro power, we have a lot of biomass, and we have excellent wind sources.”

To Professor Wallenius, phasing out nuclear in Sweden the long term is feasible though not desirable.

“In theory we could manage without nuclear energy,” he says, “but it would cost us, from my own estimates, around 400 billion Swedish crowns to phase out nuclear. What we’d lose is the low production costs, which we could have for another 25 years.”

The key dispute here is between the high capital costs of building a new reactor, as would be done under the government’s new nuclear policy, and the low cost of running the existing plants.

Bolund describes the capital cost required as a “risky economic investment” and thinks that, provided renewable energy sources are the replacement, Sweden should phase out the current nuclear power plants at the end of their current life spans.

“We can never accept that we should phase out nuclear power and replace it with fossil fuel, that’s not an option, but we don’t see that there’s a problem with replacing nuclear with sustainable energy sources, with renewable energy,” he says.

Gemma Black completed this story while on a GEJI scholarship for an exchange from UTS to the Swedish School of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.