why forbidding thoughts is a bad idea
Being a liberal i have always had problems with forbidding thoughts. And now when doing some research into “climate gate” i stumbled upon a blatant example.
During 22 years from 1984 to 2006 Sweden had a “thought ban” on nuclear reactors. It was forbidden to design nuclear power plants or calculate costs for running these plants. This was one of the consequences of a referendum in 1980 about the future of nuclear power in Sweden. (One could note that this was a strange referendum, 3 options existed but none of them was an yes. They where all about stopping nuclear power in Sweden.)
So where are we now 30 years after this referendum? Well we are trying to stop emission of greenhouse gases, mostly focused on reducing carbon dioxid. One of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is to build more nuclear power plants and phase out the ones fueled by coal.
Sure and what about all the nuclear waste we have to keep secure for 10.000 years? Thats a relevant question and leads me to why i wrote this article.
There are “new” (They where first described in the 50’s and some where running in the 60’s!) types of reactors that instead of using uranium as a fuel uses thorium. In the process they can transmute our old reactor waste. That is they reduce the waste we already have produced! The result is nuclear waste with a half-life time of less than 100 years. So the waste only needs to be stored for 100’s of years instead of 10.000+ years for conventional nuclear waste.
The Chinese and the Indians are already doing serious research into thorium based reactors and an US-Russian consortium is adapting thorium based fuel so it can be used in the reactors we already have built. A lot of this research have been done in the 30 years Sweden in principle banned nuclear research. Yes 30 years. It was first in 2009 that the Swedish government again started to give grants to nuclear power research.
This thought is not new, already in 2004 the Swedish newspaper DN published a debate article (Sorry it’s in Swedish) written by Niklas Ekdal covering this subject.
One could just wonder where Sweden would have been today if they used at least some of the approximate 20 billion SEK that went into designing a long term solution to the waste problem into nuclear power research instead of forbidding all thoughts about constructing new reactors…
And bye the way, thanks for the comments on the Swedish blog “Klimatbluffen” that gave me the idea to write something about the Swedish “thought ban” before finishing my article about green nuclear power plants.
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