Instead of moving quickly to build publicly owned nuclear power and clearly articulating its importance for phasing out fossil fuels globally, the Swedish government continues to procrastinate. The latest example is the announcement of 183 billion SEK for a new geological repository for nuclear waste.
It is difficult not to react – not only to the sheer scale of the sum, but to what it represents: yet another instance of nuclear power being burdened by politically constructed costs and institutional inertia rather than technical realities.
There is a much simpler alternative: continued interim storage. In Sweden, this takes the form of water-filled pools where spent fuel is cooled and shielded. This is not a temporary fix in the sense of being inadequate. It is a robust and well-proven method that can function safely over very long time horizons. Crucially, it also provides something that geological disposal does not: time.
Time to develop better technological solutions.
The case for geological disposal rests on a familiar assumption: that spent nuclear fuel must be isolated deep underground for up to 100,000 years. At first glance, this sounds both reasonable and morally compelling. But it contains an obvious contradiction. The 100,000-year requirement assumes that civilization is stable enough to plan, fund, and execute a century-long engineering project – yet somehow too fragile to be trusted with monitoring a storage pool a few centuries from now. You cannot have it both ways.
Because spent nuclear fuel is not merely waste. It is also a resource. With advanced reactor designs and technologies such as transmutation, there is real potential to significantly reduce both the volume and long-term radiotoxicity of spent fuel – while generating large amounts of clean electricity in the process. To permanently seal this material deep underground therefore appears, at best, premature, and at worst, a deliberate decision to foreclose future options.
This raises a more fundamental question: why the urgency to make something irreversible?
A common argument concerns security – the risk of proliferation or nuclear terrorism. But the logic here does not hold up to scrutiny. Sweden's interim storage facilities are among the most monitored, regulated, and physically secured sites in the country, operating under constant oversight precisely because of their political sensitivity. If a proliferation risk exists anywhere, it is in the vast and loosely tracked global inventory of nuclear material – not in a Swedish facility that is under continuous scrutiny. The question is not whether interim storage can be made secure. It can. The question is whether geological disposal is actually more secure, over any realistic policy horizon. The answer is far from obvious.
What is really at stake is a deeply embedded idea that the problem must be solved once and for all, permanently and irreversibly. But perhaps that very idea is the problem.
Rather than committing hundreds of billions to a system designed never to be reopened, the priority should be on what actually matters in the near term: rapidly expanding nuclear power to displace fossil fuels, in Sweden and beyond.
Seen in that light, 183 billion SEK for a geological repository is not just a large cost.
It is a misallocation. An extraordinarily expensive one.
Labels: nuclear
