Swedish Nuclear Waste Efforts

The 1976 Parliamentary election in Sweden resulted in a coalition government which imposed extremely stringent requirements for the waste produced by Swedish nuclear power plants. The industry responded with a crash study, the Nuclear Fuel Safety (KBS) project, with experts drawn from hundreds of universities and related scientific institutions. A year later, the industry presented “a complete scheme for absolutely safe storage of nuclear waste” in engineered facilities located at about 500 m depth in the Swedish granite bedrock (KBS-I). This was considered the first comprehensive and coherent scheme for “final” nuclear waste disposal. The KBS-I study was not only extensively examined and debated, it also brought down the coalition government.