Finland and Sweden are forerunners in advancing towards final disposal of spent fuel from their nuclear reactors. The relative ease at which the projects have advanced is often attributed to the high levels of trust and consensus-oriented policy tradition prevailing in these Nordic countries. For an outsider, the projects appear as highly similar. Not only are levels of interpersonal and institutional trust similarly record-high in Finland and Sweden, but both have also adopted the same repository concept, KBS-3, originally developed by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management company, SKB. The licensing processes have advanced at a similar pace, and the repositories are expected to become operational in the 2020s. In particular, Finland and Sweden are known as models in the use of community-level “partnering” approaches to repository siting and licencing. 

A deeper look at the evolution of the local partnerships in the host communities, Eurajoki and Östhammar, reveal a divergence between the passive Finnish and active Swedish approaches to stakeholder engagement. In our article, recently published in the journal Progress in Nuclear Energy, we coin the term “involved partnership” to describe the Swedish approach, in contrast with the Finnish “bystander partnership”. The Swedish municipality has sought to build its competence, pose demands on the waste management company and authorities, challenge policies and actions, and actively engage public and local actors in planning. The Finnish Eurajoki has, in turn, preferred to fully delegate responsibility to the trusted safety authority, and place municipal economic interests as its first priority.

The ideal of partnership

The notion of partnership has been developed and fostered in particular by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA 2010). For the NEA, the approach is characterised by voluntarism, right of veto by the affected community, collaboration between local stakeholders and the project implementer, and the provision of community benefit packages. A partnership thus places the local community firmly at the centre of the siting and licencing process. Obviously, such descriptions represent ideals that can never be completely achieved. Power play and asymmetries of power exist even in the egalitarian Nordic countries. However, through partnerships, especially the local veto, the municipalities have indeed been central actors in final disposal planning and implementation, along with the state and the industry.

Difficulties in accessing municipal data

To compare the two Nordic partnerships, we relied primarily on documentation produced by the municipal authorities. We analysed the long-term evolution of the national-level institutional arrangements and site selection strategies, as well as municipal-level approaches and practices. In Eurajoki, the first liaison committee between the municipality and the nuclear utility Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) was established already in the late 1970s, when the nuclear power stations were built. A joint committee focused on the disposal project was established towards the end of the 1980s, when the preliminary site characterisations began. The “Vuojoki working party” was established in 1998, while the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure - exceptionally participatory for its time - was underway, to plan further cooperation between Eurajoki and the waste management company Posiva. Unfortunately, TVO did not provide us with copies of the minutes of a new liaison committee, which in 2013 merged the two existing groups and gathered the Eurajoki, TVO and Posiva representatives under a single group. To fill the gap, we examined the minutes of the municipal board meetings and interviewed the local government chairperson who was a member of the liaison committee.

With Östhammar, similar data access problems did not emerge. Our material covered the period from the mid-1990s, the beginning of the preliminary site investigations that finally led to the choice of Östhammar, until 2018. The material analysed included the annual activity reports of the municipality's final disposal organisation, reports from the various liaison groups (the so-called Reference and Preparatory groups), the municipality's work on SKB's site investigation 2006, and a number of other key municipal reports relating to the project. Government and SKB reports served as complementary material.

The highly active Swedish municipality

Our analysis revealed a picture of the Swedish Östhammar as a municipality highly active in partnering with industry and authorities. Already at the preliminary site investigation phase, in 1995, it established a group made up of representatives from all parties as well as municipal civil servants, to build competences. As an outcome of the work, Östhammar placed its own conditions that had to be fulfilled, if SKB wanted to pursue site investigations. These included requirements that the municipality be kept up to date, its views be heard, and citizens regularly informed about the progress. The key objectives were to ensure that the municipal representatives had the requisite knowledge and capacities to collaborate on par with the SKB and state authorities, and communicate with citizens.

Over the years, the municipal organisation designed to monitor SKB’s work grew in sophistication. It was periodically revised when key siting or licencing decisions were at sight. New partners were invited to the collaboration groups, including notably the second candidate municipality, Oskarshamn, and neighbouring municipalities. University researchers and experts from the region helped the municipality to review SKB’s work. Through collaboration, Östhammar and Oskarshamn sought to pool resources and decide on joint strategies in their negotiations with SKB and authorities. The collaboration culminated in 2008 in an agreement on a community benefit package, the so-called value-added programme, without which the communities would not consent to hosting a repository.

The various collaboration groups organised study visits, workshops, seminars and conferences. They employed consultants, networked with communities outside of Sweden, and participated in international research work and debate. They engaged in technical debate with SKB and the safety authority, participated in roundtable discussions organised by the National Council for Nuclear Waste, organised training for municipal civil servants in areas ranging from chemistry and thermodynamics to environmental ethics, and organised extensive dialogue with citizens – both face-to-face and via Internet.

Passiveness in Eurajoki

The history of partnerships in Eurajoki paints a picture of a municipality primarily concerned with municipal economy, and rather uninterested in building the competence needed for dialogue with the waste management company. 

Eurajoki had welcomed the construction of nuclear power stations by TVO in the 1970s, seeing these as a vital source of revenue. By 2010, almost a third of its total annual tax revenue indeed came from TVO and Posiva. However, the municipality remained opposed to hosting a waste repository. It changed its mind only in the mid-1990s, motivated by the interest in ensuring victory in the race for hosting the country’s fifth nuclear reactor, which TVO was planning at the time. The change of position led to an intensified cooperation within two TVO-Eurajoki liaison groups, with the municipality focusing its concerns on municipal economy. Largely as a spin-off from these negotiations, Eurajoki managed to persuade the government – which was keen to advance the project – to substantially increase the real estate tax rate for a repository. 

Eurajoki prioritised economy in its partnering also in March 2008, when it announced, at an early stage, its willingness to host both the planned new reactor unit (the sixth in Finland) and the spent fuel it would produce. It openly justified its position on purely economic grounds. In contrast with its Swedish counterpart, in the licencing process the municipality has relied totally on the safety authority’s expertise, without posing any additional conditions for approval of the project. Unlike in Sweden, the relationships between the Finnish nuclear communities have been characterised more by rivalry than by collaboration, largely because of the importance of property tax as a source of municipal revenue. 

The active and passive versions of Nordic trust-based democracy? 

Differences between the Finnish and Swedish partnering approaches reflect also distinct trajectories of institutions governing nuclear waste management. For instance, in Sweden, the municipalities (just as the NGOs) can apply for funding for review and information activities. In Finland, no such arrangements are place, but the institutional setting seeks to ensure that the candidate municipalities have an economic incentive to host a facility. The Swedish two-track licencing system also places the environmental and nuclear-safety “paradigms” or “regimes” on a fairly equal footing. In licencing in Finland, environmental considerations are represented mainly via the EIA process, which has only advisory role in decision-making.

However, our recent research on vigilance by national press (Kojo et al. 2020; see also Lehtonen et al. 2021) in the area of nuclear waste management, lends support to the view that the difference between the Swedish active and Finnish passive approaches have deeper roots. The two on the surface similar Nordics have not only distinct institutional incentives in this policy area, but also different political and democratic cultures. The Finnish policy culture has been characterised by certain passiveness, poor legitimacy of radical citizen activism, and less deliberative (Arter 2008) and more permissive to authoritarian solutions that the Swedish policy culture (Pettersson & Nurmela 2007).

Source: Kari, M., Kojo, M. & Lehtonen, M. 2021. Role of the host communities in final disposal of spent nuclear fuel in Finland and Sweden. Progress in Nuclear Energy 133 (March). 

References

Arter, D. 2008. Scandinavian politics today. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Pp. 152–153, 159.

Kojo, M., Kari, M., Litmanen, T., Vilhunen, T. & Lehtonen, M. 2020. The critical Swedes and the consensual Finns: Leading newspapers as watchdogs or lapdogs of nuclear waste repository licensing? Energy Research and Social Science Vol. 61 (March).

Lehtonen, M., Kojo, M., Kari, M., Litmanen, T. 2021. Healthy mistrust or complacent confidence? Civic vigilance in the reporting by leading newspapers on nuclear waste disposal in Finland and France. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy. 

NEA. 2010. Partnering for Long-Term Management of Radioactive Waste: Evolution and Current Practice in Thirteen Countries. Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, Paris. NEA No. 6823.

Pettersson, T. & Nurmela, S. 2007. Eri tapoja kohdata suuri elefantti. Suomalaisen ja ruotsalaisen kulttuurin vertaileva tutkimus. Espoo: Suomalais-ruotsalainen kulttuurirahasto, 2007.