FYI | May 01 2006
By Greg Peel
"At 9am on Monday, April 28, technicians at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, 60 miles north of Stockholm, noticed disturbing signals blipping across their computer screens. Those signals revealed abnormally high levels of radiation, a sure sign of serious trouble. At first suspecting difficulties in their own reactors, the engineers searched frantically for a leak. Outside, monitors took Geiger counter readings of the soil and greenery surrounding the plant. The result showed four to five times the normal amount of radioactive emissions. Clearly, something was wrong – terribly wrong.
"From Finland, Norway and Denmark came the same disquieting signals. Somewhere, some mysterious source was spewing dangerous radiation into the atmosphere, into the air that people and plants were breathing. By now thoroughly frightened, the Swedes quickly confirmed that the source was not in their country. They immediately turned their suspicions southward, to their powerful neighbour, the Soviet Union." (John Greenwald, Time magazine, 1986)
Australia had already set its nuclear energy policy pretty much in stone in 1979 when the Three Mile Island scare occurred in the US. Nuclear was a dirty word, and uranium was not something Australia wanted to offer to the world – well, not too much anyway. The significantly more tragic Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union only hammered home general public rejection, and the Nuclear Disarmament Party was attracting support.
You would have expected Sweden to do the same, if the above piece in Time magazine is any indication. But this is not the case – Sweden now generates 90% of its electricity from a combination of hydro and nuclear power