The nuclear reactor at Oskarshamn was closed down late on Saturday night after a fire broke out at the plant.
Although the fire, which broke out in the turbine hall of Unit 2, was quickly put out by the plant’s own emergency services, the reactor and the turbine were closed down as a precautionary measure.
It is still unclear when the reactor 2 can be restarted again, with investigations ongoing.
The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) has recommended a tripling of the fee paid by the country's nuclear power industry towards paying for management of the country's nuclear waste.
SSM has been tasked with assessing what level of fee Sweden's nuclear generators should be required to pay into the country's Nuclear Waste Fund for the next three years. Basing its assessment on information gathered from the relevant organisations - including cost estimates from the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co (SKB) - SSM has recommended to the government that the fee should be set at 3 öre per kWh of nuclear electricity produced. The current level is 1 öre per kWh. (1 öre is worth approximately $0.001.)
 INES 2 |
Several mine workers overexposed by X-rays |
Personnel at Boliden Mineral have been exposed to X-rays. Personnel from the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority were on site at the mine in Gällivare to investigate the event that is now being analysed. The Authority has made a provisional INES classification of the event as INES Level 2. This is based on the current knowledge of doses to the exposed personnel.
A leaked European Commission draft report says Europe should solve the problem of handling nuclear waste by making industry pay to stash it deep underground, where it will be overseen by independent watchdogs.
"The current situation of spent fuel and radioactive waste management in EU member states is not satisfactory," says the draft, seen by Reuters Thursday.
Brussels is against member states exporting their nuclear waste to countries outside the EU or to store it in joint sites, energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger said, as the commission is working on a set of common safety standards for this dangerous material.
"It is the duty of national politicians to do their homework," Mr Oettinger told Financial Times Deutschland in an interview published on Wednesday (10 March). The German commissioner warned against common storage sites, as well as exporting the radioactive material outside the EU, for instance Russia.
The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.
Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it.
The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world. But now it seems it was also used as a dumping ground for Russian nuclear waste and chemical weapons.
State owned Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest power producing companies, has found itself in the middle of a political storm since it became known they had plans to sell their part of the Swedish power grid. Accusations that CEO Lars G. Josefsson has ‘pledged’ the entire corporate group, in an agreement with German authorities, has made the Minister for Enterprise, Maud Olofsson, to put forward strong criticism.
A Finnish energy company wants to build a nuclear power plant along the Botnia Bay. Local authorities in neighboring Sweden consider the analysis of the project's environmental consequences to be insufficient.
The Finnish energy company Fennovoima Oy wants to build a nuclear power plant in the Botnia Bay, close to the Swedish border. The company has made an analysis of the project's environmental consequences, but this has been met with criticism and distrust from locals. Municipal authorities in the Swedish town of Luleå consider the analysis to be “lacking objectivity”.
Finland and Sweden are working on technology for the safe burial of nuclear waste in bedrock. A partly Finnish-designed machine was on display at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in Sweden. The purpose of the device is to transport the dangerous materials deep into caverns excavated for the purpose.
The highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel needs to be isolated for at least 100,000 years.
Sweden is preparing to bury a total of about 12,000 tonnes of radioactive uranium waste.
This must take the record for the trippiest data-center build anywhere, ever: It's an old nuclear bunker 30 meters below central Stockholm, and its new conversion for one of Sweden's biggest ISPs has made it truly 007-worthy. Check it: it has simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls, there're German submarine engines rigged as emergency backup generators, plus there's 1.5 megawatts of cooling for the servers. Oh, and it can survive a hydrogen bomb attack.
