Sweden’s utility-owned nuclear waste company submitted additional documentation to the government this week backing up its safety case for the copper canisters in which it proposes to permanently store the country’s spent nuclear fuel (SNF) - buried deep below the surface. This came just over a year after Sweden’s Land and Environment Court refused to sign off on the safety of the canisters, upending not just the program to build a geological disposal facility (GDF) in Sweden, but also potentially throwing a wrench in similar programs that assume the use of such copper canisters - particularly programs in Finland and Canada (NIW Jan.26’18). It remains uncertain what sort of knock-on effect the Swedish dispute over the safe- ty of these canisters will have in other countries, but in Sweden it’s clear that this will at a minimum set back any repository construction by several years.
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