Some things I learned this week: Almost half of Sweden’s electricity is produced by its 11 nuclear power plants. Polls show Swedes to be quite positive towards nuclear power, and they have been ever since a 1980 referendum that placed a moratorium on building new plants. Despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, decommissioning well-maintained Swedish plants before the end their operating life has been broadly opposed on environmental grounds, because the required energy would then have to be produced either by burning more fossil fuels or by damming more rivers.

Earlier this week, Folkpartiet became the first serious political party to propose overturning the 1980 referendum [Swedish], and to allow the building of new reactors, should demand warrant it. The grounds are two-fold:

1: If nuclear energy is safe, then why not increase its use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even furtherSweden’s carbon dioxide emmissions in 2000 are some 40% below 1970 levels because of the use of nuclear power.?

2: (And this is clever) Jan Björklund, vice chair (or something) of FP, maintains that since the referendum was held in 1980, everybody aged 42 and under today — more than half of the Swedish population — was not able to vote in it, and so perhaps its mandate has expiredNote to self: Use this argument next time Kim mentions the Second Amendment..

The second reason strikes me as rather silly: At best, it might argue for a new referendum, but it does not constitute a moral argument for the wholesale abandonment of the policies chosen by the last referendum.

What about the first reason? If nuclear energy is as safe as in 1980 then this in itself is not a reason to overturn the moratorium. But if it is now safer…

Last month, surely by coincidence, Swedish research commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) led to two important pieces of news regarding the long-term safety of nuclear waste, though neither item was paid much attention to in the mainstream press (though perhaps FP did).

The first piece of news illustrates nicely the Rumsfeldian epistemological universe“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”: We used to think we knew all about the properties of plutonium oxide, one of the most important radioactive compounds in nuclear waste, although this “knowledge” was unfounded: in Rumsfeldian parlance, it was an unknown unknown &mdash we didn’t know we didn’t know. Four years ago, it was discovered that PuO₂ could oxidize in the presence of water to form what appeared to be a stable compound with unknown properties: We now had a known unknown on our hands — we knew that risk assessments for nuclear waste storage were, well, at risk.

Finally, last month, research by the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) showed that the oxidized compound is not that stable after all, and not as easy to create as originally thought. The original risk assessments have been confirmed, except that now, arguably, we have a known known, which is a better place to be than not knowing we didn’t know this 5 years ago.

Second, KTH is piloting a study on some emerging technologies that may make it possible to greatly reduce the length of time waste stays radioactive, while at the same time generating energy from the process. It sounds very clever.

On the whole, I think it is reasonable to argue, nuclear technology has become safer over the last two decades. Against this, however, we now need to place a new risk: mass terrorism. It would have lacked symbolism, but had the planes hijacked on 9/11 aimed for nuclear power plants instead of buildings, we might have had four Chernobyl-sized no-go zones on the east coast of the US todayA post-9/11 report commissioned by the US nuclear energy lobby says otherwise, but read between the lines: Several paragraphs explain why crashes were modelled with 767s, not the larger 747s: Because there are far more 767s around, apparently. Note to terrorists: Use 747s. As a general rule, too, I would discount any report that has the following line in it: “Clearly an impact of this magnitude would do great damage to a plant’s ability to generate electricity.”.

The main pragmatic lesson I learned from 9/11 is that the future will become more decentralized, not less. Laying all your eggs in one basket creates high value targets, and nuclear power plants are nothing if not that. You could also bomb a dam, of course, but even that is a brief and repairable tragedy. Nuclear power plants are basically “dirty” bombs without detonators. Terrorists are detonators in search of bombs. Nuclear power, unfortunately, does not have a future in this kind of world.