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Finland is building the world's first permanent disposal site for nuclear waste, with no shortage of people wanting to be its neighbours
Link information
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- Title
- Finns say yes to nuclear waste | DW | 11.08.2022
- Authors
- Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)
- Published
- Oct 8 2022
- Word count
- 853 words
I thought it was a sarcastic title, tbh.
That's fascinating, but I guess that's what high trust in your government can do, as well as openness about the plan. American plans tended to be hush-hush, and we have a tendency to freak out about nuclear anything.
I am somewhat surprised that a European country is this cool about nuclear power, though, because I thought there was a trend against it.
I used to live in Nevada where the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility was supposed to have built. And while I agree with the 100-yard view that the reason it never got finished was entirely political, it makes perfect sense why people in Nevada hated it so much. The state had never once run a working nuclear plant, and it was easy to create the image of everyone getting around one's back and bullying you to deal with their collective trash.
And then there was the issue of transportation; although the means has been proven to have a pretty fantastic track record, Nevada residents were extra nervous about anything nuclear because the state was already used as a nuclear weapons testing ground. This was made extra worrysome by the fact that some transportation routes would go through Las Vegas.
That being said, I couldn't in good concious make the argument that any other location in the US would have any different result.
Germany is certainly against it, (though Ive heard that that sentiment is changing a little bit with the russian gas problem), but not all of Europe. For example, France is the second largest producer of nuclear power (behind the US), and the country with the largest fraction of its electricity powered by nuclear, at 69%. (the us is at 19%). Outside of France and Germany, I cant say I know a lot about individual countries sentiment towards nuclear power, but Europe is far from homogeneous on the topic.
Wasn't France scaling down its nuclear program? I thought they'd stopped a couple plants after Fukushima in the normal post-accident fear cycle.
They did briefly, but quickly started up again. in the past 2 years or so there have been a few plants that had to be brought down for extended maintenance, but France is also in the process of building a new, 3rd gen pressurized water reactor.
From Wikipedia, there was a plan to scale back nuclear power in France to 50% of generated power, but it’s been delayed. It seems like 50% would still be quite high?
Memory is obviously not a valid source but I remember that France and Germany (who, as mentioned, is a bit more hostile to nuclear) were committing to not using more, and at least these two countries had halted projects at the time. @Toric mentioned France is building third-gen pressurized water reactor as well, which is good I think.
Looking it up, France wants to go from 70% to 50%, by 2025? But it's more of that backwards thinking where shutting down the plants doesn't solve the problems that nuclear actually has (and Finland is addressing properly).
And still, that would likely be more overall output than it was at 75% (as energy usage continues to grow exponentially) and if memory serves right the plan was more focused on diversifying energy resources.