swedens energy crisis

Today it’s an extremely cold day in Sweden. Down to about -40 in some areas and in Stockholm it has been -20. This has put a big strain on Swedens electrical grid. Also a couple of nuclear power plant’s is down for maintenance. And even thou today approx. 7-8% of Swedens electricity is imported from neighboring countries supply still have a hard time meeting the demand. So Swedish newspapers have been warning about the issue and are recomending people to conserve energy. Also a couple of emergency power plants have been ordered to power up to try to meet the demand of electricity. This means starting to burn oil to produce electricity.

The solution is quite easy. And even reduces emission of greenhouse gases. Build some more more nuclear power plants and at the time increase transmission capacity to our neighbors. This way we have some headroom for cold days. If that’s not enough we could import more electricity when needed. But it works both ways, when not using the extra capacity we could export cheap and clean nuclear power to Germany and other countries that use a lot of power plants using coal as a source. And if we use the thorium reactors i mentioned  the other day we could actually get rid of our nuclear waste at the same time.

Unfortunately it takes so long time to build new power plants that Sweden would face this issue many times before they are operational.

green nuclear power plants

I consider nuclear power a relatively green and safe power source. This due to the fact that power plants running on coal spew out enormous amounts of carbon dioxide during normal production, but nuclear plants only pollutes during an catastrophic event due to malfunction. Added to this is that globally 10.000 people die yearly in coal mines and there is an estimate that only in the united states some 23.000 people per year die due to air pollution from coal-fired power plants.

But reading an article in Wired the other day, really made my head spin. They painted up an picture that made a “new” (It’s not really new, first experiments was made in the 50′s. Experimental reactors where running in the 60′s!) reactor look like the holy grail in solving our energy needs.

It’s a nuclear reactor burning thorium instead of uranium or plutonium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium and it does not need expensive enrichment. That means you can use all the thorium you mine. When using uranium in a nuclear power plant you only use one specific isotope and this is normally 3-5 % of the ore. So most of the uranium mined is useless for generating power.

You might say what about the storage of the waste from the reactor? The radioactive waste from a conventional reactor needs to be stored for 10.000+ years. And that is quite a challenge…

The neat thing is that since thorium is a lighter than uranium the waste is of a completely different nature. It “only” has to be stored for a couple of 100 years. And if that is not good enough, if we mix the waste from our current reactors in the fuel it burns up generating energy and transmutes into short lived isotopes!

Too good to bee true? Whats the catch?

First of all it is a more complicated process, the fuel get’s polluted and looses efficiency over time, so there need to be a process to remove these pollutants. But the rest of the “catches” are what normal people would call features. The fuel is harder to ignite which means it is safer, much less risk of a reactor meltdown. The waste is polluted with a uranium isotope that makes it unsuitable for nuclear weapons. And one of the biggest problems is that the nuclear industry is not interested. Why not? Well their business model is largely built on enriching uranium and selling fuel to the reactors. And thorium based reactors does not need any enriched fuel, just dig it up out of the ground, clean it and start running your reactor. Yes quite simplified, but truth is that the producers of nuclear fuel will have to find other ways of earning money.

So if these reactors was running in the 60′s how come we don’t run them today? Some cynics say it’s due to the fact that they do not produce plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. But this is not really true, since most commercial reactors produce an isotope of plutonium not really suitable for weapons. The real issue was time to market. In 1973 the Arab states cut off oil supply to the west. So the US decided to lower their dependency on oil, and that quick. That year, the US nuclear industry signed contracts to build a record 41 uranium based nuclear power plants. So all the money and research went into uranium based fission.

But India wen’t in another direction. Since they where developing a nuclear weapons arsenal they where outside the non-proliferation treaty and where largely excluded from trade in nuclear plant equipment and fuel. Also they lacked indigenous uranium, but have 12% of known thorium deposits in the world. So they started developing a nuclear fuel cycle using thorium. And are today running a hybrid using conventional reactors to ignite the thorium.

But these reactors still generate a large amount of regular long lived nuclear waste. The really cool reactors is called molten salt reactors (MSR). These work by pumping a molten flouride salt containing thorium and some uranium (or waste from regular reactors) through the reactor. This liquid is then continuously cleaned from radioactive pollutants. The pollutants have the nice property that when you store them for about 10 months they turn into fuel that is feed back into the reactor.

So while some people argue about the IPCC and who is right or wrong in climate gate (Sorry in Swedish) and others are discussing how to get the world united on carbon dioxide emissions (Also in Swedish), why don’t we start by solving the engineering issues with the thorium fuel  cycle and start replacing coal based electricity with green energy from thorium.

An extensive article about thorium reactors can be found in an 2006 issue of cosmos. More in depth information about thorium and thorium reactors can be found at the world nuclear association.

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.

more on drugs and harm reduction

Today the Swedish minister of public health Maria Larsson announced that she would like it to be possible for the Swedish state to buy drugs.

The situation in Sweden today is that the police has to arrest someone carrying a new designer drug to have a sample to analyze she want’s to rationalise things buy letting the goverment proactive buy drugs for analyze and by that means spead up hte process of criminalizing the new drugs.

And finally she says the classic statement that shows that she has missed the whole pont: “The discussion about drugs must be brought up at the kitchen table and in schools.” It will not work! Today the Swedish official stance is that all drugs are “killers” and that you immediatly will get addicted and fall out of society. But the kids are not stupid, they see friends using drugs, they do research on internet and they discuss with their peers. And the conclusion for many of them? That the state and other authorities are lying! (There is a open letter to the minister stating the same thing here.)

So the day when we really need to warn about a new drug or a bad batch the kids will not listen.

In the modern transparent society we need to have policies based on evidence and facts, we also need to regain trust from drug users, drug abusers and teenagers at risk. This is one part of what i call harm reduction. Another Swedish blogger commented on that here.

Another part is needle exchange programs for those who inject drugs. There has been a trial program for over 20 years in the Malmö/Lund region and the other day there where an evaluation of the program. The conclution was that the needle exchange program did not help. But read this comment from the top medical officer handling epidemic diseases in the region:

(Translated from Swedish, se the link above for the original.)

“Last year 25 persons got HIV from sharing needles, 24 of theese live in Stockholm”

Mind you Stockholm does not have a needle exchange program… And one! case in the rest of the country, and we don’t even know if he is from the region with the needle exchange program. Not starting with needle exchange programs right away is just cynical!

And then we havn’t even considerd all the other possibilities of vaccinations against hepatitis, health checks and actually meeting and building up trus amongst the abusers.

Happily the city of Helsingborg has realised this, congratulations for doing something right in figthting the downside of drugs!

I have had some feedback on my post the other day about errors in the translation of official EU documents translating “drug use” to “drug abuse” when translating to Swedish and Danish. Some have asked me in private: “But shurly it must be a misstake on that page or a misstake by that translator” But no this is systematic.

For you that are billingual check out another English page and it’s Swedish translation. Note that “drug use” have turned into “Narkotikamissbruk” (Drug abuse in Swedish). The danish page is here, there the phrase is translated into “narkotikamisbrug”. And there is several examples all over those pages.

Please submit komments! And if you find any more misstranslated pages please let me know. Naturally not only pages related to drugs. All systematic translation errors are interesting, i will do something about them even if they go against my political compass. Cause it is so totally wrong to change the meaning of a text!

And to them who dissagree with my vievs above, would you fell ok if Swedish documents with “drug abuse” where to be translated into documents stating “drug use” instead? This is a 2 way street you know…

drug use or drug abuse

It may seem that i have a hangup around drugs.

And that’s correct i love drinking beer and a occasional Becherovka or Tuzemský slinks down. But nothing else, it just isn’t my cup of tea. But i hang out with drug users, and have no problem with them using drugs. I actually have a much bigger problem with people getting to drunk and violent…

But i have an even bigger hangup of the Swedish system of criminalising and hunting drug users. I think it’s counter productive. And it’s so established that even official translations of EU documents is translated wrong to suit the official stance.

I guess you don’t believe me. Official EU documents being forged while translated? No way!

Ok time for some proof, when an English document says “Drug use” it is translated as “drug abuse” (Narkotikamissbruk or drogmissbruk in Swedish.)

Take for example this site in English and in Swedish.

This is just outrageous! How can this be allowed? Is there any way to complain and eventually get an ending to this?

Also what kind of trust can we have in other more important documents? Is all material rigged in this way?

Big questions i know, but i would like to have an answer. And a stop to this!

By the way i would like to have some feedback from you all. Which other translation of the page above does the same? Please give me that feedback and i will keep this page updated. And only real persons with knowledge in the language, i don’t trust translation engines in this matter.

Wrongly translated:

Swedish: Narkotikamissbruk (Narcotic abuse)

Danish: Stofmisbruget (substance abuse)

Rightly translated:

English: Drug use

Estonian: kasutama (use)

Finnish: käyttö (use)

French: consommation de drogue (consumption of drugs)

Portuguese: consumo de droga (consumption of drugs)
Spanish: consumo de drogas (consumption of drugs)

German: Drogenkonsum (Drug consumption)

Polish: zażywanie (use)

a small report from the drug liberal czech republic

A strange (For anywhere else in Europe besides Holland) incident happened yesterday.

I was sitting with my friends at a local “hospoda” (Czech for pub) chatting and drinking a couple of Gambrinus (a Czech brand of lager) when a police officer came in and ordred a beer. In his uniform… (I guess that is strange enough in most countries.)

He walked over to a table and chatted with one of the local guys and afterward he sat down with his friends. Not so strange maybe, but add the following into the scene:

• Several packages of large rolling paper where scattered around the table.
• Several boxes of cigarettes had pieces torn of to be rolled up as “filters”.
• A number of half cigarettes with that typical twist on the top so the tobacco would not fall out.

To me that is a big indication of what is going on, not to mention the fact that they where going outside for a smoke once in a while. (Remeber here in the Czech Republic there is no ban on smoking in pubs, bars and restaurants…)

A little bit later another local at the pub walked over to the table and discreetly received a small package of marijuana, not bothered at all with the police officer sitting half a meter away.

That how totally open the drug scene is here in Prague. And a lot of downtown bars and discoteques have clean horisontal mirrors in the toilets so you have a clean surface to split your cocaine on. So dope apparently isn’t a high priority here.

I guess the police concentrates on hunting people who actually hurt others or steal, instead of hunting pot and cannabis smokers or people buying sexual services. This liberalisation is going on all over Europe except in Sweden, reports Henrik Alexandersson. I guess the Swedish government will scream like hell when the Danes start opening coffe shops in Copenhagen, only 20 mimnutes by train from Swedens third city Malmö.

By the way, The Economist have a good article about The war on drugs and liberalisation of narcotic related laws.

trafficing and giant lizards

Reading the Swedish online tabloids is getting on my nerves (yes i know i should stop instead of complaining…) The other day it was a fabricated story about a mind reading machine. And now today in an article about a fossile of a pliosaur aka. predator X in Svalbard. They managed to place Svalbard in Scandinavia. Well it is quite a long way from the Scandinavian Peninsula to Svalbard…

In another article someone is upset about prostitution on one of the boats inbetwen Sweden and Latvia. And they call it trafficking.

Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, harbouring, or receipt of people for the purposes of slavery, forced labor (including bonded labor or debt bondage), and servitude. (Definition frrecruitmentom wikipedia.)

Well i guess there could be cases where trafficking wictims are transported or recruited on the boats, but prostitution is the act of selling sexual services. And trafficking is the slave trade. So could we please keep the two things seperate so we know what we are talking about, that would help much more that whining in a tabloid.

shit and alcohol eq energy

Yesterday i wrote about garbage and “secondary raw materials”. Today i stumbled over another strange way of generating energy. In the Swedish cities Laholm and Båstad they extract heat and electricity from, hold your breath! Shit and fine spirits…

Basically they collect manure (that’s a nicer word for shit), leftovers from schools and restaurants and other organic waste and mix this with spirits confiscated from smugglers. Now they ferment this slurry for about 25 days and in the process a lot of methane is generated. Enough to cover 20-25% of the heating in the area and 21 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When they are done they return the dry remnants of the slurry to the farmers to use as fertilizer.

A translation by google translate can be found here.

two sides of a trash problem

The other day i picked up an issue of the magazine “Czech Buisiness Weekly” (CBW) at the Pink Floyd bar in downtown Prague.

It was mostly filled with articles regarding the Czech presidency for the European Union and the economic crisis. But in the editorial i found an interesting side effect of the global economic slowdown. A garbage crisis!

That is, the Czechs used to export a lot of garbage to China! And now due to the economic crisis China, the worlds biggest buyer of “secondary raw materials”. Have stopped buying and transporting garbage to China. I guess they don’t expect to refine so much Czech trash into Chinese trash and export it back to Europe.

Strangely enough a couple of days later i read as they used to do about the opposite problem in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the last six months the Swedish garbage production has dropped by 20%. So now there isn’t enough garbage to feed the remote heating system in Gothenburg. According to Dagens Industri they have started to import garbage from Norway and Holland to keep the Swedes warm.

So Swedish tourists visiting Prague, please bring your garbage with you back home and you will help two nations

The liberati is here

So finally we in the Liberati have published our five point declaration defining what the Liberati is and our view of the future of liberal politics in Sweden.

The Liberati has allready stired up a loot of feelings in the Swedish blog sphere. Mostly a lot of nit picking regarding the name and the persons engaged. But also over the fact that the core of Liberati has some strict criteria for who will be part of it. (The core that is or you might call it the steering committee.)  But come on, we are starting a new movement in Swedish politics and for this to become effective we need a tight group that meets frequently and discusses the core aspects that Liberati will be focused on.  It’s just not doable without some steering and especially not if there is to many chefs stiring the same pot.

And there is also a lot of people sceptical to the fact that the founder is the Swedish artist and philosopher Alexander Bard. People being sceptical due to this don’t really know what they are talking about. I have rarely meet anyone so bright and motivated as Alexander, and mostly everything he have touched he has excelled with. I’m totally confident that the same will happen with the Liberati.

So please have a look at our five point declaration above and give me some feedback!

Update: I guess i should inform you that the liberati homepage is now officially launced.