Finland is now better able to conduct a previously unthinkable domestic political debate about its relationship with NATO because it can unhook its power grid…
The Finnish power consortium TVO had fired up a long-delayed new nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto-3, in December. On Saturday, the new plant, running at about six per cent of its 1,600-megawatt capacity, was hooked up to Finland’s power grid. It will take until July to be operating flat-out. It is Europe’s first new working reactor in almost 15 years, and Finland’s first in more than 40.
The plan for Olkiluoto-3 was approved in 2005 and was to be built by France’s Areva and Germany’s Siemens AG, with a start date of 2009. But there were immediate problems with construction quality, and tensions grew between the builders and the Finnish regulator.Article content This has all contributed to shocking cost overruns, and the EPR design, once considered the herald of a new atomic age, has been superseded. , according to one independent nuke-biz report. But 1,600 megawatts is an awful lot of energy — about one-seventh of Finland’s entire electricity demand.
All of this undoubtedly looks a lot more like Finnish genius, with Europe and Russia waging bitter economic war and energy prices at a premium everywhere, than it would have just a month ago. It’s not really a surprise that nearly everything that might go wrong with the construction of a nuclear plant did, in fact, go wrong along the way.Article content