JONATHAN HOLMES: Summers are short in the far north of Europe. The Baltic Sea is warm enough to swim in for just a few short weeks - except here, in an inlet on the Swedish coast, where a nuclear power station returns its cooling water to the sea. The water's 10 degrees warmer than the sea beyond the outfall, providing pleasant swimming for four months of the year.
There's no radiation in the water?
MAN IN WATER: No, absolutely not. It's just the cooling water, so it just passes through the system very rapidly. So there's nothing - it's perfectly safe.
JONATHAN HOLMES: With hydro and nuclear power providing 90 per cent of its electricity, Sweden has one of the lowest per capita outputs of greenhouse gas in the developed world. With 80 per cent of its electricity generated by burning coal, Australia has the second highest. As the evidence for global warming becomes undeniable, voices from both major parties are calling for a new debate on nuclear power.
BRENDAN NELSON: I think in Australia that we owe it to ourselves and, more importantly, to future generations of not only Australians but other people throughout the world to look at the nuclear option as one of the things that we need to consider for our future.
JONATHAN HOLMES: On Four Corners tonight: is it time the country which supplies uranium to the world looks its fears about nuclear power in the face?
Less than a month before his sudden retirement from politics, New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, re-opened a debate that's divided the Labor Party for more than 30 years.
BOB CARR: There is only one answer, and that is to leave the carbon economy behind us. That will take decades, but we must start now.
ANTHONY ALBANESE: In the climate of international terrorism, the issue of nuclear proliferation is even more acute than it has ever been.
PETER GARRETT: I don't think it's good for the country, I don't think it's good for our environment to go nuclear and it's certainly not good for employment. Thank you delegates.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Peter Garrett, of course, is a veteran of the anti-nuclear movement, which has fought the uranium and nuclear industries for decades. Garrett is sticking to his guns, but some of his old colleagues in the movement, like former Greenpeace international head Paul Gilding, are changing their tune.
PAUL GILDING: I mean as a person who thinks that climate change is the most important issue we face, I say thankyou to the nuclear power industry and the uranium industry because they've brought the climate change debate into the mainstream. I don't think they are the prime solution in this area, but they will be part of the debate and they may be part of the solution. But, most importantly, they put it onto the main stage, and that is a very exciting development.
JONATHAN HOLMES: To the right of the political spectrum there are signs of a seismic shift too. The official position of the federal government is still that, climate change or no climate change, Australia's future lies with coal and gas. Yet freshman West Australian MP Dennis Jensen claims that his call for a serious debate on nuclear power has been overwhelmingly supported by coalition MPs.
When you say 'overwhelmingly supportive', are you saying that a majority of the members of the coalition would support looking at nuclear power?
DENNIS JENSEN: Yes.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Have you counted them?
DENNIS JENSEN: I've counted the ones that I've actually spoken to and, of about 40, more than 30, 30 to 35 have been supportive.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Twelve days ago, at the National Press Club, the Minister for Science, Brendan Nelson, went out of his way to back the call for a nuclear power debate.
BRENDAN NELSON: The government, of which I am a member, currently does not have a particular - have a position on this. Personally, I think we should, notwithstanding the hysteria that can be generated by this issue, because the reality is that our world is warming.
JONATHAN HOLMES: It's a reality the Howard government has been very slow to face. Just a month ago, its own research paper warned that global warming will endanger the Great Barrier Reef and much of Australia's agricultural production. Yet officially the government still doesn't accept unequivocally that the human production of greenhouse gases is the culprit.
IAN MACFARLANE: There is still a degree of uncertainty in the connection between global warming, which we accept that it appears as though the globe is warming but only slightly, and whether or not that is entirely or largely due to human activity. The jury's still out on that.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Resources minister, Ian Macfarlane, is sitting firmly on the fence too on the question of Australian nuclear power.
IAN MACFARLANE: Well, I think that public debate is good, and I think that it's up to the general public to decide whether they want to move down the nuclear power track. In terms of the here and now issue for us, it very much rests in the area of uranium, and that's the area that I'm focusing on.
JONATHAN HOLMES: There's been no equivocation by the government about uranium mining. It has shouldered aside the Northern Territory's Labor government to give the green light to more mines. And a few days ago, in Canberra, Ian Macfarlane chaired a strategy meeting attended by some of the most powerful players in the global uranium industry. That industry is lobbying hard. Its top priority is more uranium, but it's keen for nuclear power to be put on the agenda in Australia too.
PETER GARRETT: I think what's happened with global warming is it's given the nuclear industry an opportunity to sort of fly its flag again, convince governments that, if they are going to invest money and make big political decisions about dealing with global warming, then, hey, the answer's already here sitting right in front of you; it's nuclear power all over again.
JONATHAN HOLMES: It's been 35 years since Australia last seriously contemplated getting into the business of nuclear power. It was a different era. It's hard to believe now that anyone could have thought it a good idea to build a 500-megawatt nuclear reactor on the shores of Jervis Bay.
WOMAN AT JERVIS BAY: It's not unknown for a pregnant female to give birth early, and there's a very strong possibility that this is what's happening out here today. They will invariably come in to a shallow, sheltered bay away from the ocean swells to give birth.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The bay is now a marine park, the jewel of the New South Wales south coast. But its southern shore is Commonwealth land, and at Murray Beach, near the tip of what's now Boodaree National Park, an overgrown car park carved out of the hillside is all that remains of Sir Philip Baxter's dream. In 1970, the head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission held public meetings in Nowra to discuss his plans, and Four Corners, as ever, was there.
PHILIP BAXTER: The present position on this is that tenders have been called for such a station. This is a very complex operation and ...
BRIAN KING: Behind any discussion of nuclear technology lies one thought. The fact is that, no matter which type of station Australia gets, it will be capable of producing enough plutonium to make several bombs of this magnitude each year.
Do you think Australia should produce nuclear weapons?
PHILIP BAXTER: At this point in time, no.
BRIAN KING: Do you think Australia should have the ability to produce nuclear weapons?
PHILIP BAXTER: I think Australia should keep its options open.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In fact, we now know that Sir Philip Baxter and Prime Minister John Gorton were determined to build a nuclear reactor here precisely to give Australia the option of making its own nuclear weapons. When Billy McMahon took over from John Gorton, he killed both the reactor project and the nuclear weapons option. At about the same time, on the other side of the world, a country not dissimilar from Australia also decided against nuclear weapons. But Sweden, without any coal or oil of its own, went ahead with nuclear power, and 35 years later the public attitude to nuclear power in those two countries could scarcely be more different.
MAN: No, you can have your nuclear, especially in areas like this.
MAN: It was knocked back then, and I think it should be knocked back now.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Why?
MAN: Oh, well, I don't think we know enough about it, and accidents do happen and have happened.
WOMAN: A really remote area might be more feasible with the littlest population possible around, if you had to consider it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Do you think we have to?
WOMAN: Well, I'd rather not.
JONATHAN HOLMES: A 20-flight to Kastrup International Airport in Denmark, and a 20-minute ferry ride past Hamlet's Castle at Elsinore, brings you to a country which for the past 20 years has generated half its electricity from nuclear reactors. They aren't sited in remote locations. They're in three places on the southern Swedish coast, surrounded by villages and quite close to substantial towns.
MAN: I think it's clean.
MAN: I don't see it as dangerous or a threat or anything like that.
MAN: We have lived here for many years and we have - so we have no fear for it.
WOMAN: I think it's safe for the children. We have been at the plant to see what happens and so on, and the scientists say that it's less radiation inside than outside because of the mountains and everything. So, no, I don't think it's any worries at all.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Close up, the sheer size and power of a big nuclear-generating plant is awesome. The Swedish power company Vattenfall runs four reactors at a single site at Ringhals on Sweden's west coast. The super-heated steam that rushes from the reactors produces around 900 megawatts in each of the plant's four giant turbine halls. The reactors at Ringhals produce more electricity than the total capacity of South Australia. Building these colossal plants costs greenhouse gas emissions as well as money. So does the mining, milling and enrichment of the uranium fuel. But the actual operation of the plant produces no greenhouse gas emissions at all. In almost 30 years of continuous operation there've been no major incidents at Ringhals or at any other Swedish reactor. The control room operators look to have one of the world's more boring jobs. They've never, so far, had to push the emergency button to close down the reactors.
Small wonder that Agneta Rising, Vattenfall's Vice-President for the Environment and a former president of the World Nuclear Association, sounds a might complacent.
AGNETA RISIING: The safety is at very high level. It is managed. You can do it in a bad way; you can do it in a good way. But it's done in a good way. So in Sweden you had for a period a quite anti-nuclear discussion, but it has today changed to a very pro-nuclear discussion, because climate change is the most important issue and today we have about 80 per cent of the Swedish people would like to continue to use nuclear power.
MARTTI: This is uranium dioxide, which gives its energy as heat. It raises steam, and steam is conducted to the turbines.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Inside a modern pressurised water reactor are around 470 fuel elements like this: pellets of uranium encased in steel rods. It's been enriched until it contains about six times the natural amount of the fissionable isotope uranium 235. But the fuel started out as uranium ore, dug out of the ground in Canada, Namibia, Uzbeckistan or Australia. It was the discovery of vast uranium deposits in the Northern Territory and later South Australia that first sparked major anti-nuclear protests in Australia.
PROTESTORS: One, two, three, four, uranium leads to nuclear war. Five, six ...
JONATHAN HOLMES: The protesters' focus was always on the danger that Australian uranium would end up in nuclear weapons. Twenty years earlier, British atom bomb tests had polluted large tracts of the South Australian outback. In the '60s, the French and the Americans had done the same to Pacific atolls, and in the '70s the US bases at Pine Gap and Nurrungar were potential nuclear targets.
PAUL GILDING: I guess it was really our kind of connection into the global anti-nuclear movement, broadly speaking. Really the focus was we were facing the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and that was our kind of emotional, physical, practical connection to that international debate.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Sweden, through the 1970s, with six nuclear reactors under construction and six more on the drawing board, they were more concerned about the environmental hazards posed by nuclear power: what about the spent fuel, what about low-level radiation? Then came Three Mile Island.
P.A. FROM FIRE ENGINE: Could I have your attention please. There has been a state of emergency declared on Three Mile Island.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The core meltdown in a reactor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was the world's first televised nuclear emergency. The containment building stayed intact. The release of radioactive gases was relatively minor. There were no fatalities. But around the world the realisation dawned that nuclear energy carried with it deadly dangers.
NADER: Do you want a nuclear plant in your community? They answered no.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Sweden as well as in America there was a national outcry, and the government responded.
INGER ARENANDER: The Three Mile Island accident changed the whole scenery in Sweden. People were scared of course, and politically in Sweden the Social Democrats again, who were governing, they switched opinion, like, you know, turning hand, because the pressure from the Green groups, from the environmental people was already very high to hold a referendum in Sweden about whether we should continue this program with nuclear power or not.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In a March 1980 referendum, a clear majority of Swedes voted to build all 12 planned reactors but then to shut them down at a rate that was possible taking into account the need for electricity to sustain employment and wellbeing.
AGNETA RISING: It was a strange referendum because you had three choice and all of them was including that you should close down nuclear but only how fast you should do it. It was never a possibility for people to choose nuclear at that referendum.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The parliament in Stockholm then decided, and officially the decision still stands, to phase out nuclear power completely by 2010. The Swedish Social Democrats' nuclear policy was and is about as logical as the three uranium mines only policy thrashed out at around the same time by its sister party in Australia, the ALP.
BOB HAWKE: If you left the uranium in the ground, it would do nothing for the questions of peace and disarmament.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Both governments had to reconcile their nation's economic interest with the deeply felt passions of their anti-nuclear supporters. In 1986, those passions reached their height.
NEWS REPORTER: The fire following a meltdown of nuclear fuel at a power station in the Soviet Union is still burning intensely. The station is spewing a radioactive cloud over Europe.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Chernobyl disaster had a more direct effect on Sweden and Finland than on any other countries outside the Soviet bloc. For the first few days, as the reactor burned, the winds blew from south to north.
INGER ARENANDER: Because people in the north of Sweden, hunters, they're hunting, they're fishing, they had to throw away their meat and they had to throw away their fish. They couldn't pick wild berries or mushrooms in the forests. So it was a scary thing that had very practical and nearby effects on people in Sweden.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Scandinavia, as in the rest of the world, the reputation of the nuclear industry was at its nadir in the late 1980s. But gradually opinion changed. Acid rain from European coal-fired power stations was poisoning Sweden's lakes and forests much more devastatingly than the fallout from Chernobyl, and the nuclear industry was successful in reassuring people that Chernobyl couldn't happen here.
AGNETA RISIING: First I would like to point out when it comes to Chernobyl that it was a reactor type that would never be approved in the Western world.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The industry and its supporters worldwide point out that Chernobyl's reactors were moderated by graphite, which caught fire when the core overheated.
DENNIS JENSEN: They've never been used commercially in the West. They never would be. The other thing is the technology since those reactors has moved on a long way. The advanced boiling water reactors and pressurised water reactors these days are in order of magnitude safer than they were previously.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Of course, they concede, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were evacuated and have never been able to return to their homes. But fears that tens of thousands would die from the long-term effects of radiation have so far not been borne out.
AGNETA RISIING: It is a very big accident with very big consequences. Still the health consequences of Chernobyl was about 40 people dead. They were all workers at the station, or rescue workers. Of the general public, it's about 2,000 thyroid cancers among children, and this is of course very severe that you get so many thyroid cancers. Hopefully most of them can be treated. And these are the effects of radiation.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Opinion on matters nuclear has changed little in Australia since Chernobyl. But polls say that 80 per cent of Swedes now want to keep their existing reactors as long as possible; and in Finland, whose lakes and forests were affected even more by the fallout, they've commissioned the first new nuclear reactor in the Western world since the Chernobyl disaster. It's being constructed at Olkiluoto, on Finland's west coast, where two of the country's four existing nuclear reactors are already sited.
My visit to Olkiluoto coincided with an open day for the Finnish press. It's the summer silly season. There aren't many stories around, so there's a big turnout. Their hosts hope the journalists will focus on the sheer scale of the enterprise. When completed, Olkiluoto Three will have the biggest electrical output of any single reactor in the world: a massive 1,600 megawatts, or enough to power the entire state of Tasmania.
The final decision to build the reactor was taken two years ago and was certainly controversial. In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the project's director concedes, it would've been unthinkable.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: It was a time when it was not the right time to talk about this, and at that time of course the fossil fuel power plants were built and the output was increased. But that road nobody can continue any more. The reason for the new plant is really that the consumption goes up, Finland is committed to Kyoto protocol. If we shall fulfil our - to lower emissions, we need nuclear power.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Both the Finns and their French and German suppliers claim that the new European pressurised water reactor will produce electricity safely and at a competitive price. But critics of nuclear power are sceptical.
MARK DIESENDORF: It's really hard to get data on what's going on there. Is it really a free market? I would question that. Finland is the only developed country that is building new nuclear power stations. Most of the new nuclear power is being built in developing countries like China and Taiwan, and in these countries we do not have a free market for electricity. We have enormous state subsidies. And it should be said that in the United States and the United Kingdom there are well-demonstrated huge subsidies to nuclear power going on right now.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: This is a completely privately owned company - no state subsidies, no state support whatsoever. We have open books. You can see in our books to what cost we produce electricity, and how safe and how reliable the production is. It's a very competitive price too.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But a competitive price in Europe may not be competitive in Australia.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: Now we are going to the balcony of the reactor core.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The market price for electricity is substantially higher there than here. And this January, to satisfy its Kyoto protocol obligations, the EU introduced a carbon emissions trading system that gives nuclear power a big cost advantage over coal.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: You come here closer. Those which are bright, they are fresh fuel; and those which are dark in the middle, you can scarcely see them, they are spent.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Australia, of course, has refused to ratify Kyoto, mainly because the government wants nothing to do with carbon taxes or compulsory caps on greenhouse emissions.
IAN MACFARLANE: Well, what we have seen in Australia is that industries are moving down that track voluntarily, that shareholders and company directors are requiring a triple bottom line. The reality is that corporate awareness of the environmental responsibility is large and is real and these companies are working towards it, even though it may mean in some cases high prices to consumers and perhaps reduced levels of profits.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Between them, coal and gas make up more than 10 per cent of Australia's exports and generate 90 per cent of its electricity. Small wonder, say the critics, that the fossil fuel lobby virtually dictates Australia's energy policy. After a decade of scepticism about global warming, the federal government is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to help develop a technological fix that promises one day emission-free coal fuel power, as a whiz-bang coal industry video explains.
NARRATOR: As power stations of the future begin to adopt carbon capture and storage techniques, the carbon dioxide will be captured at source and pumped back into suitable underground geological structures, preventing its release into the atmosphere.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But so-called geo-sequestration technology is still in its infancy and the eventual costs are unknown. Meanwhile, there's talk of building more coal-fired power stations to keep up with our soaring demand for energy. Conservationists are horrified.
MARK DIESENDORF: When we use coal-fired electricity with all its huge environmental and health damages, there's nothing in the price of that electricity to compensate for the damage that is already being done in terms of climate change, in terms of air pollution, in terms of land degradation, which is really quite enormous.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Energy expert Mark Diesendorf argues that, if we concentrated on cutting our profligate use of power and invested heavily in renewable technology, we wouldn't need more big power stations, either coal-fired or nuclear. At present, wind turbines generate just 0.3 per cent of Australia's electricity. By international standards, say the government's critics, that's pathetic.
PETER GARRETT: I mean, we ought to be setting up a sustainable energy bank, guaranteed by the government with the triple A ratings that are necessary to invest in a massive way in renewable technologies, efficiency measures and demand management measures around this country. I mean, that's what they are starting to do in other countries. We are not doing it here.
JONATHAN HOLMES: They are certainly doing it in Denmark, the wind power capital of the world. This tiny, comparatively crowded country gets an astonishing 20 per cent of its electricity from wind power, most of it generated by thousands of turbines scattered in small groups around the lush Danish countryside; some older and smaller; some like these, new and colossal. Until you get close to them, it's hard to appreciate just how big they are.
In recent years, the country's begun investing in some of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world. They are expensive to install and connect to the grid, and the power they generate is still heavily subsidised. But costs are coming down and the wind power industry believes it could ultimately produce half of Denmark's electricity.
HANNE JERSILD: We could actually reach a 50 per cent target with about 1,700 turbines instead of the 5,000 that we have today covering only 20 per cent of the electricity.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Fewer, but bigger and better.
HANNE JERSILD: So fewer, but bigger and better, and much more efficient of course, yes.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The nuclear enthusiasts across the water in Sweden are deeply sceptical.
AGNETA RISIING: They can make it in Denmark maybe because they have back-up from Norway and Sweden, and hydropower. You need almost to have hydropower to be very quick in adding power to the net when the wind goes down. The Danish people don't have this themselves, so they get this from the neighbouring countries. We see it as maybe it can reach as high as 20 per cent wind power in the system and that's about the limit, otherwise you get - it will become unstable and you need so much back-up and it will be very costly for the society.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Swedes and the Danes have been irritating each other over these issues for decades. Most Danish electricity is still generated by burning coal, which sends pollution drifting across the narrow strait towards Sweden. At the same time, the Danes have been complaining bitterly about the nuclear reactors the Swedes chose to build immediately opposite Copenhagen's most popular beaches.
NILS HOOGE: You can actually with your own eyes see the two reactors. So one could argue that this is probably the worst-located nuclear power plant in the world.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Seven years ago the Swedes closed one of the reactors. Just seven weeks ago, they closed the second. To anti-nuclear campaigner Nils Hooge it's good riddance to bad rubbish.
NILS HOOGE: I mean, in my opinion fossil fuels should be phased out if possible, and the same pertains to nuclear power for sure.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And the future is those windmills over there?
NILS HOOGE: I mean, you have the old technology and on the other side of the Oresund here and you have the future just to my left here. I mean, we are positioned here in a very interesting place actually. We have the past and the future in one view.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Ironically, the Swedish government, a fragile coalition of social democrats and anti-nuclear greens, agrees. That's why it decided in the teeth of fierce opposition from local voters to close the reactors at Barseback.
MARIE GRANLUND: I think it's very bad to be so dependent on the nuclear power. We have to have biomass, we have to have wind power, we have to have hydropower and so on, and of course the sun cells is very interesting. If you don't - as long as you all only have the nuclear power, you don't try to get something else, and I think it's just when you say you have to close down then also you start to think about new things. So it's a process.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But the big power companies haven't lost faith in nuclear. At Vattenfall's headquarters in Stockholm they told me they are investing $1,000,000,000 upgrading the remaining 10 reactors to replace the capacity lost at Barseback. They are betting that the politicians will soon have to fall in line with a pro-nuclear public opinion.
NILS ANDERSSON: You can see now very clear is that the climate change problem is the new environmental problem and that that's why we can now see that some of the political parties that were against nuclear are changing their minds in those days and I think that we will come up with a result that we can use our units as long as they are safe and profitable.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So the change in the physical climate is changing the political climate?
NILS ANDERSSON: Yes, I think so. I think so.
JONATHAN HOLMES: If the political climate is changing in Australia too, the public is still deeply distrustful of nuclear power. Witness the fear and fury surrounding the vexed issue of nuclear waste. Australia's record on nuclear waste is not encouraging. Since it was opened 40 years ago, much of the spent fuel from the Lucas Heights reactor has been shipped to France and Britain for reprocessing. Eventually the residue, by then classified as intermediate waste, will be returned to Australia. The first shipment is due in 2011. Instead of developing a well-thought out plan for its permanent disposal, state, territory and federal governments have spent most of that time exchanging insulting, and they still are.
BRENDAN NELSON: There is absolutely no room for mucking about now and we're certainly not going to be held hostage by political parochialism.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Northern Territory will be an unwilling host to the Commonwealth's low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste because South Australia adamantly refused to accept a national repository at Woomera.
BRENDAN NELSON: I think it's an absolute disgrace and a shameful reflection on the leadership of the South Australian government that at a place, Woomera, far, far distant from any large population centre there was proposed to be a low-level and intermediate-level storage facility, that that was so strongly opposed where the state government is enthusiastically wanting to get uranium out of the ground at Olympic Dam and have it exported overseas in my view is completely hypocrisy.
PETER GARRETT: The proposals for burial were frankly pretty paltry. I mean, it wasn't like it was going to be, you know, contained in the best technologies with the most careful prudence that Australia could ever deliver. I mean, it was a five-metre trench out in the bush. I mean, it was an outrage and the people of South Australia had every right to be up in arms about it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors poses the most formidable problem for the advocates of nuclear power. So far the English-speaking world has been notably bad at dealing with it. At Britain's Sellafield reprocessed waste accumulates in the cooling ponds. After 50 years there's still no agreement on where or how to dispose of it, and the funds to do so have been spent propping up the nuclear industry.
In the United States the federal government wants to bury thousands of cubic metres of high-level waste in Yucca Mountain. The state and people of Nevada are determined to stop it, and geologists now say the rock might not be suitable anyway.
But in the pretty harbour city of Askarshamn, on the Baltic coast south of Stockholm, the deep rock laboratory where they are testing their plan to bury Sweden's nuclear waste forever is a tourist attraction and most people seem unconcerned at the prospect.
MAN: If they say it's not dangerous then we have to believe them. I trust them.
WOMAN: I trust the staff we have and their knowledge of everything and I think it's very good.
WOMAN: I'm not afraid of it.
WOMAN: No comment.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Most, though of course not all. You don't think it's a good idea?
WOMAN: No, I don't think so. I don't like it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: If the Swedes have a high degree of trust in their engineers, it's been earned over time. The country's treatment of its nuclear waste is typically thorough. All radioactive waste is transported by sea in a purpose-built ship, the Sigyn, to one of two destinations.
At Forsmark, north of Stockholm, the low- and intermediate-level waste is offloaded and placed for permanent storage in an elaborate series of tunnels burrowed into the granite bedrock.
The high-level waste, mainly the spent fuel elements from the reactors, is far too hot to be buried. In containers capable of withstanding its 300-degree heat, it's brought here to CLAB, the central interim storage facility near Oskarshamn. The containers are opened under water, the fuel elements are removed, and then lowered 100 metres down to giant storage pools, themselves 30 metres deep, constructed in caverns carved out of the bedrock and seated on earthquake proof insulators. And there they must stay, I was told by Brita Freudnethal of CLAB, gradually cooling and losing some of their radioactivity for 30 or 40 years.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: This is somewhere about 4,200 tonnes of used fuel and it comes from 12 different nuclear plants.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So that represents 50 per cent of Sweden's electricity for 30 years.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: Yes, really, and this is all of it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Like the Americans, the Swedes decided not to reprocess their spent fuel for fear the resulting plutonium could be misused. That means they have a large quantity of highly radioactive waste to dispose of. It will be toxic to the biosphere for at least 1,000 years, and more radioactive than normal rock for a 100,000 more.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: You have eight metres between the surface of the water and the surface of the storage canisters.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So is there any radiation coming out to us here at all?
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: No, and you could take a swim, it wouldn't hurt you.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Is that right?
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: As long as you didn't swallow the water.
JONATHAN HOLMES: While the fuel cools off, the Swedes have had three decades to plan what to do with it next. They don't do things by halves. The granite bedrock in their country is at least 900,000,000 years old. They intend to drive a five-kilometre long tunnel through it, big enough to accommodate massive trucks, to a depth of 500 metres. At the bottom will be a whole network of further tunnels, with holes bored ready for the spent fuel canisters. Each canister made of solid copper that cannot corrode will be surrounded by bentonite clay, which will expand when wet, holding the canister's rigidly in place. Then the tunnels will be backfilled right back to the surface.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: Okay, we are here.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And to make sure the concept will work, the Swedes have dug themselves a deep rock laboratory five kilometres long and 500-metres deep.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: So beware, there's a step there. So now we are at the 340 level and we will actually walk quite a long way down.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And walk we did, through the dripping bedrock. Matthias Karlsson was keen that I understand the innumerable experiments that are being conducted down here. Some of them take years.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: This is an experiment giving us knowledge of how long we will have free oxygen in the tunnel system, which is very important for corrosion around the copper canister.
JONATHAN HOLMES: This place, I kept reminding myself, is not where they are actually planning to bury the waste. It's just a laboratory. They have two possible sites, and when they have made a final decision they will bore a whole new set of tunnels through the rock.
What's the magical property of bentonite? Why's that special?
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: Because the bentonite sucks up water, until it's been saturated, and when it's done that it's very hard for water to move around the copper canister.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Swedes calculate that the entire exercise, the temporary storage at CLAB, the deep rock laboratory and the final disposal of all the fuel used by the current reactors will cost around $12,000,000,000. Most of the money is already in the bank, accumulated at the rate of about one-fifth of a cent per kilowatt hour, ever since the reactors first started back in the 1970s.
ANDERS SJOLAND: We have a good confidence that this system would work. But of course we are humble. We still will maintain the research and the vigilance for a long time and if something would show that something is wrong, then of course we have to start anew. So it's a big effort, yes, but as this issue is so important and as the time frame is so enormous, this effort has to be done in order to make a clear safety case for future generations.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Finns are working on much the same solution as the Swedes, in much the same billion-year-old bedrock. But how many other nuclear nations will be so organised? Will China be? Will India? Would Australia do better than Britain has done? Certainly not right now.
BRENDAN NELSON: It may be that economically and environmentally that nuclear power doesn't stack up for us. But I think we ought to have a serious look at it. And I have been dealing with hysteria from some of the state and territory governments in relation to the long-term safe storage of low-level and intermediate-level nuclear waste, and if that's a taste of what we face in trying to have any sort of sane discussion about nuclear power then it's difficult to see how we are going to get through it.
PETER GARRETT: The decision that people have to make and the governments have to make is whether they want to, in a sense, invest both their faith, their finances and their future in a system that is expensive and produces poison. That's really what they have got to work out, and the trade-off that's given is, well, if we don't do that we are going to keep on polluting the planet. Now I think that's a false choice because there are other necessary and urgent things that we should do to stop polluting the planet, and building nuclear power plants is not the answer.
JONATHAN HOLMES: There's no unanimity about nuclear energy in Sweden either. Some people have always wanted to be rid of it. But the one thing I found that nobody wanted was coal-fired electricity. People think of that as poison. Everyone fears what they don't know more than what they do. And those who think Australia should be persuaded to stop worrying and love the atom have a long, hard road ahead of them.
There's no radiation in the water?
MAN IN WATER: No, absolutely not. It's just the cooling water, so it just passes through the system very rapidly. So there's nothing - it's perfectly safe.
JONATHAN HOLMES: With hydro and nuclear power providing 90 per cent of its electricity, Sweden has one of the lowest per capita outputs of greenhouse gas in the developed world. With 80 per cent of its electricity generated by burning coal, Australia has the second highest. As the evidence for global warming becomes undeniable, voices from both major parties are calling for a new debate on nuclear power.
BRENDAN NELSON: I think in Australia that we owe it to ourselves and, more importantly, to future generations of not only Australians but other people throughout the world to look at the nuclear option as one of the things that we need to consider for our future.
JONATHAN HOLMES: On Four Corners tonight: is it time the country which supplies uranium to the world looks its fears about nuclear power in the face?
Less than a month before his sudden retirement from politics, New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, re-opened a debate that's divided the Labor Party for more than 30 years.
BOB CARR: There is only one answer, and that is to leave the carbon economy behind us. That will take decades, but we must start now.
ANTHONY ALBANESE: In the climate of international terrorism, the issue of nuclear proliferation is even more acute than it has ever been.
PETER GARRETT: I don't think it's good for the country, I don't think it's good for our environment to go nuclear and it's certainly not good for employment. Thank you delegates.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Peter Garrett, of course, is a veteran of the anti-nuclear movement, which has fought the uranium and nuclear industries for decades. Garrett is sticking to his guns, but some of his old colleagues in the movement, like former Greenpeace international head Paul Gilding, are changing their tune.
PAUL GILDING: I mean as a person who thinks that climate change is the most important issue we face, I say thankyou to the nuclear power industry and the uranium industry because they've brought the climate change debate into the mainstream. I don't think they are the prime solution in this area, but they will be part of the debate and they may be part of the solution. But, most importantly, they put it onto the main stage, and that is a very exciting development.
JONATHAN HOLMES: To the right of the political spectrum there are signs of a seismic shift too. The official position of the federal government is still that, climate change or no climate change, Australia's future lies with coal and gas. Yet freshman West Australian MP Dennis Jensen claims that his call for a serious debate on nuclear power has been overwhelmingly supported by coalition MPs.
When you say 'overwhelmingly supportive', are you saying that a majority of the members of the coalition would support looking at nuclear power?
DENNIS JENSEN: Yes.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Have you counted them?
DENNIS JENSEN: I've counted the ones that I've actually spoken to and, of about 40, more than 30, 30 to 35 have been supportive.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Twelve days ago, at the National Press Club, the Minister for Science, Brendan Nelson, went out of his way to back the call for a nuclear power debate.
BRENDAN NELSON: The government, of which I am a member, currently does not have a particular - have a position on this. Personally, I think we should, notwithstanding the hysteria that can be generated by this issue, because the reality is that our world is warming.
JONATHAN HOLMES: It's a reality the Howard government has been very slow to face. Just a month ago, its own research paper warned that global warming will endanger the Great Barrier Reef and much of Australia's agricultural production. Yet officially the government still doesn't accept unequivocally that the human production of greenhouse gases is the culprit.
IAN MACFARLANE: There is still a degree of uncertainty in the connection between global warming, which we accept that it appears as though the globe is warming but only slightly, and whether or not that is entirely or largely due to human activity. The jury's still out on that.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Resources minister, Ian Macfarlane, is sitting firmly on the fence too on the question of Australian nuclear power.
IAN MACFARLANE: Well, I think that public debate is good, and I think that it's up to the general public to decide whether they want to move down the nuclear power track. In terms of the here and now issue for us, it very much rests in the area of uranium, and that's the area that I'm focusing on.
JONATHAN HOLMES: There's been no equivocation by the government about uranium mining. It has shouldered aside the Northern Territory's Labor government to give the green light to more mines. And a few days ago, in Canberra, Ian Macfarlane chaired a strategy meeting attended by some of the most powerful players in the global uranium industry. That industry is lobbying hard. Its top priority is more uranium, but it's keen for nuclear power to be put on the agenda in Australia too.
PETER GARRETT: I think what's happened with global warming is it's given the nuclear industry an opportunity to sort of fly its flag again, convince governments that, if they are going to invest money and make big political decisions about dealing with global warming, then, hey, the answer's already here sitting right in front of you; it's nuclear power all over again.
JONATHAN HOLMES: It's been 35 years since Australia last seriously contemplated getting into the business of nuclear power. It was a different era. It's hard to believe now that anyone could have thought it a good idea to build a 500-megawatt nuclear reactor on the shores of Jervis Bay.
WOMAN AT JERVIS BAY: It's not unknown for a pregnant female to give birth early, and there's a very strong possibility that this is what's happening out here today. They will invariably come in to a shallow, sheltered bay away from the ocean swells to give birth.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The bay is now a marine park, the jewel of the New South Wales south coast. But its southern shore is Commonwealth land, and at Murray Beach, near the tip of what's now Boodaree National Park, an overgrown car park carved out of the hillside is all that remains of Sir Philip Baxter's dream. In 1970, the head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission held public meetings in Nowra to discuss his plans, and Four Corners, as ever, was there.
PHILIP BAXTER: The present position on this is that tenders have been called for such a station. This is a very complex operation and ...
BRIAN KING: Behind any discussion of nuclear technology lies one thought. The fact is that, no matter which type of station Australia gets, it will be capable of producing enough plutonium to make several bombs of this magnitude each year.
Do you think Australia should produce nuclear weapons?
PHILIP BAXTER: At this point in time, no.
BRIAN KING: Do you think Australia should have the ability to produce nuclear weapons?
PHILIP BAXTER: I think Australia should keep its options open.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In fact, we now know that Sir Philip Baxter and Prime Minister John Gorton were determined to build a nuclear reactor here precisely to give Australia the option of making its own nuclear weapons. When Billy McMahon took over from John Gorton, he killed both the reactor project and the nuclear weapons option. At about the same time, on the other side of the world, a country not dissimilar from Australia also decided against nuclear weapons. But Sweden, without any coal or oil of its own, went ahead with nuclear power, and 35 years later the public attitude to nuclear power in those two countries could scarcely be more different.
MAN: No, you can have your nuclear, especially in areas like this.
MAN: It was knocked back then, and I think it should be knocked back now.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Why?
MAN: Oh, well, I don't think we know enough about it, and accidents do happen and have happened.
WOMAN: A really remote area might be more feasible with the littlest population possible around, if you had to consider it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Do you think we have to?
WOMAN: Well, I'd rather not.
JONATHAN HOLMES: A 20-flight to Kastrup International Airport in Denmark, and a 20-minute ferry ride past Hamlet's Castle at Elsinore, brings you to a country which for the past 20 years has generated half its electricity from nuclear reactors. They aren't sited in remote locations. They're in three places on the southern Swedish coast, surrounded by villages and quite close to substantial towns.
MAN: I think it's clean.
MAN: I don't see it as dangerous or a threat or anything like that.
MAN: We have lived here for many years and we have - so we have no fear for it.
WOMAN: I think it's safe for the children. We have been at the plant to see what happens and so on, and the scientists say that it's less radiation inside than outside because of the mountains and everything. So, no, I don't think it's any worries at all.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Close up, the sheer size and power of a big nuclear-generating plant is awesome. The Swedish power company Vattenfall runs four reactors at a single site at Ringhals on Sweden's west coast. The super-heated steam that rushes from the reactors produces around 900 megawatts in each of the plant's four giant turbine halls. The reactors at Ringhals produce more electricity than the total capacity of South Australia. Building these colossal plants costs greenhouse gas emissions as well as money. So does the mining, milling and enrichment of the uranium fuel. But the actual operation of the plant produces no greenhouse gas emissions at all. In almost 30 years of continuous operation there've been no major incidents at Ringhals or at any other Swedish reactor. The control room operators look to have one of the world's more boring jobs. They've never, so far, had to push the emergency button to close down the reactors.
Small wonder that Agneta Rising, Vattenfall's Vice-President for the Environment and a former president of the World Nuclear Association, sounds a might complacent.
AGNETA RISIING: The safety is at very high level. It is managed. You can do it in a bad way; you can do it in a good way. But it's done in a good way. So in Sweden you had for a period a quite anti-nuclear discussion, but it has today changed to a very pro-nuclear discussion, because climate change is the most important issue and today we have about 80 per cent of the Swedish people would like to continue to use nuclear power.
MARTTI: This is uranium dioxide, which gives its energy as heat. It raises steam, and steam is conducted to the turbines.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Inside a modern pressurised water reactor are around 470 fuel elements like this: pellets of uranium encased in steel rods. It's been enriched until it contains about six times the natural amount of the fissionable isotope uranium 235. But the fuel started out as uranium ore, dug out of the ground in Canada, Namibia, Uzbeckistan or Australia. It was the discovery of vast uranium deposits in the Northern Territory and later South Australia that first sparked major anti-nuclear protests in Australia.
PROTESTORS: One, two, three, four, uranium leads to nuclear war. Five, six ...
JONATHAN HOLMES: The protesters' focus was always on the danger that Australian uranium would end up in nuclear weapons. Twenty years earlier, British atom bomb tests had polluted large tracts of the South Australian outback. In the '60s, the French and the Americans had done the same to Pacific atolls, and in the '70s the US bases at Pine Gap and Nurrungar were potential nuclear targets.
PAUL GILDING: I guess it was really our kind of connection into the global anti-nuclear movement, broadly speaking. Really the focus was we were facing the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and that was our kind of emotional, physical, practical connection to that international debate.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Sweden, through the 1970s, with six nuclear reactors under construction and six more on the drawing board, they were more concerned about the environmental hazards posed by nuclear power: what about the spent fuel, what about low-level radiation? Then came Three Mile Island.
P.A. FROM FIRE ENGINE: Could I have your attention please. There has been a state of emergency declared on Three Mile Island.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The core meltdown in a reactor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was the world's first televised nuclear emergency. The containment building stayed intact. The release of radioactive gases was relatively minor. There were no fatalities. But around the world the realisation dawned that nuclear energy carried with it deadly dangers.
NADER: Do you want a nuclear plant in your community? They answered no.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Sweden as well as in America there was a national outcry, and the government responded.
INGER ARENANDER: The Three Mile Island accident changed the whole scenery in Sweden. People were scared of course, and politically in Sweden the Social Democrats again, who were governing, they switched opinion, like, you know, turning hand, because the pressure from the Green groups, from the environmental people was already very high to hold a referendum in Sweden about whether we should continue this program with nuclear power or not.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In a March 1980 referendum, a clear majority of Swedes voted to build all 12 planned reactors but then to shut them down at a rate that was possible taking into account the need for electricity to sustain employment and wellbeing.
AGNETA RISING: It was a strange referendum because you had three choice and all of them was including that you should close down nuclear but only how fast you should do it. It was never a possibility for people to choose nuclear at that referendum.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The parliament in Stockholm then decided, and officially the decision still stands, to phase out nuclear power completely by 2010. The Swedish Social Democrats' nuclear policy was and is about as logical as the three uranium mines only policy thrashed out at around the same time by its sister party in Australia, the ALP.
BOB HAWKE: If you left the uranium in the ground, it would do nothing for the questions of peace and disarmament.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Both governments had to reconcile their nation's economic interest with the deeply felt passions of their anti-nuclear supporters. In 1986, those passions reached their height.
NEWS REPORTER: The fire following a meltdown of nuclear fuel at a power station in the Soviet Union is still burning intensely. The station is spewing a radioactive cloud over Europe.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Chernobyl disaster had a more direct effect on Sweden and Finland than on any other countries outside the Soviet bloc. For the first few days, as the reactor burned, the winds blew from south to north.
INGER ARENANDER: Because people in the north of Sweden, hunters, they're hunting, they're fishing, they had to throw away their meat and they had to throw away their fish. They couldn't pick wild berries or mushrooms in the forests. So it was a scary thing that had very practical and nearby effects on people in Sweden.
JONATHAN HOLMES: In Scandinavia, as in the rest of the world, the reputation of the nuclear industry was at its nadir in the late 1980s. But gradually opinion changed. Acid rain from European coal-fired power stations was poisoning Sweden's lakes and forests much more devastatingly than the fallout from Chernobyl, and the nuclear industry was successful in reassuring people that Chernobyl couldn't happen here.
AGNETA RISIING: First I would like to point out when it comes to Chernobyl that it was a reactor type that would never be approved in the Western world.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The industry and its supporters worldwide point out that Chernobyl's reactors were moderated by graphite, which caught fire when the core overheated.
DENNIS JENSEN: They've never been used commercially in the West. They never would be. The other thing is the technology since those reactors has moved on a long way. The advanced boiling water reactors and pressurised water reactors these days are in order of magnitude safer than they were previously.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Of course, they concede, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were evacuated and have never been able to return to their homes. But fears that tens of thousands would die from the long-term effects of radiation have so far not been borne out.
AGNETA RISIING: It is a very big accident with very big consequences. Still the health consequences of Chernobyl was about 40 people dead. They were all workers at the station, or rescue workers. Of the general public, it's about 2,000 thyroid cancers among children, and this is of course very severe that you get so many thyroid cancers. Hopefully most of them can be treated. And these are the effects of radiation.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Opinion on matters nuclear has changed little in Australia since Chernobyl. But polls say that 80 per cent of Swedes now want to keep their existing reactors as long as possible; and in Finland, whose lakes and forests were affected even more by the fallout, they've commissioned the first new nuclear reactor in the Western world since the Chernobyl disaster. It's being constructed at Olkiluoto, on Finland's west coast, where two of the country's four existing nuclear reactors are already sited.
My visit to Olkiluoto coincided with an open day for the Finnish press. It's the summer silly season. There aren't many stories around, so there's a big turnout. Their hosts hope the journalists will focus on the sheer scale of the enterprise. When completed, Olkiluoto Three will have the biggest electrical output of any single reactor in the world: a massive 1,600 megawatts, or enough to power the entire state of Tasmania.
The final decision to build the reactor was taken two years ago and was certainly controversial. In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the project's director concedes, it would've been unthinkable.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: It was a time when it was not the right time to talk about this, and at that time of course the fossil fuel power plants were built and the output was increased. But that road nobody can continue any more. The reason for the new plant is really that the consumption goes up, Finland is committed to Kyoto protocol. If we shall fulfil our - to lower emissions, we need nuclear power.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Both the Finns and their French and German suppliers claim that the new European pressurised water reactor will produce electricity safely and at a competitive price. But critics of nuclear power are sceptical.
MARK DIESENDORF: It's really hard to get data on what's going on there. Is it really a free market? I would question that. Finland is the only developed country that is building new nuclear power stations. Most of the new nuclear power is being built in developing countries like China and Taiwan, and in these countries we do not have a free market for electricity. We have enormous state subsidies. And it should be said that in the United States and the United Kingdom there are well-demonstrated huge subsidies to nuclear power going on right now.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: This is a completely privately owned company - no state subsidies, no state support whatsoever. We have open books. You can see in our books to what cost we produce electricity, and how safe and how reliable the production is. It's a very competitive price too.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But a competitive price in Europe may not be competitive in Australia.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: Now we are going to the balcony of the reactor core.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The market price for electricity is substantially higher there than here. And this January, to satisfy its Kyoto protocol obligations, the EU introduced a carbon emissions trading system that gives nuclear power a big cost advantage over coal.
MARTIN LANDTMAN: You come here closer. Those which are bright, they are fresh fuel; and those which are dark in the middle, you can scarcely see them, they are spent.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Australia, of course, has refused to ratify Kyoto, mainly because the government wants nothing to do with carbon taxes or compulsory caps on greenhouse emissions.
IAN MACFARLANE: Well, what we have seen in Australia is that industries are moving down that track voluntarily, that shareholders and company directors are requiring a triple bottom line. The reality is that corporate awareness of the environmental responsibility is large and is real and these companies are working towards it, even though it may mean in some cases high prices to consumers and perhaps reduced levels of profits.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Between them, coal and gas make up more than 10 per cent of Australia's exports and generate 90 per cent of its electricity. Small wonder, say the critics, that the fossil fuel lobby virtually dictates Australia's energy policy. After a decade of scepticism about global warming, the federal government is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to help develop a technological fix that promises one day emission-free coal fuel power, as a whiz-bang coal industry video explains.
NARRATOR: As power stations of the future begin to adopt carbon capture and storage techniques, the carbon dioxide will be captured at source and pumped back into suitable underground geological structures, preventing its release into the atmosphere.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But so-called geo-sequestration technology is still in its infancy and the eventual costs are unknown. Meanwhile, there's talk of building more coal-fired power stations to keep up with our soaring demand for energy. Conservationists are horrified.
MARK DIESENDORF: When we use coal-fired electricity with all its huge environmental and health damages, there's nothing in the price of that electricity to compensate for the damage that is already being done in terms of climate change, in terms of air pollution, in terms of land degradation, which is really quite enormous.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Energy expert Mark Diesendorf argues that, if we concentrated on cutting our profligate use of power and invested heavily in renewable technology, we wouldn't need more big power stations, either coal-fired or nuclear. At present, wind turbines generate just 0.3 per cent of Australia's electricity. By international standards, say the government's critics, that's pathetic.
PETER GARRETT: I mean, we ought to be setting up a sustainable energy bank, guaranteed by the government with the triple A ratings that are necessary to invest in a massive way in renewable technologies, efficiency measures and demand management measures around this country. I mean, that's what they are starting to do in other countries. We are not doing it here.
JONATHAN HOLMES: They are certainly doing it in Denmark, the wind power capital of the world. This tiny, comparatively crowded country gets an astonishing 20 per cent of its electricity from wind power, most of it generated by thousands of turbines scattered in small groups around the lush Danish countryside; some older and smaller; some like these, new and colossal. Until you get close to them, it's hard to appreciate just how big they are.
In recent years, the country's begun investing in some of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world. They are expensive to install and connect to the grid, and the power they generate is still heavily subsidised. But costs are coming down and the wind power industry believes it could ultimately produce half of Denmark's electricity.
HANNE JERSILD: We could actually reach a 50 per cent target with about 1,700 turbines instead of the 5,000 that we have today covering only 20 per cent of the electricity.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Fewer, but bigger and better.
HANNE JERSILD: So fewer, but bigger and better, and much more efficient of course, yes.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The nuclear enthusiasts across the water in Sweden are deeply sceptical.
AGNETA RISIING: They can make it in Denmark maybe because they have back-up from Norway and Sweden, and hydropower. You need almost to have hydropower to be very quick in adding power to the net when the wind goes down. The Danish people don't have this themselves, so they get this from the neighbouring countries. We see it as maybe it can reach as high as 20 per cent wind power in the system and that's about the limit, otherwise you get - it will become unstable and you need so much back-up and it will be very costly for the society.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Swedes and the Danes have been irritating each other over these issues for decades. Most Danish electricity is still generated by burning coal, which sends pollution drifting across the narrow strait towards Sweden. At the same time, the Danes have been complaining bitterly about the nuclear reactors the Swedes chose to build immediately opposite Copenhagen's most popular beaches.
NILS HOOGE: You can actually with your own eyes see the two reactors. So one could argue that this is probably the worst-located nuclear power plant in the world.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Seven years ago the Swedes closed one of the reactors. Just seven weeks ago, they closed the second. To anti-nuclear campaigner Nils Hooge it's good riddance to bad rubbish.
NILS HOOGE: I mean, in my opinion fossil fuels should be phased out if possible, and the same pertains to nuclear power for sure.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And the future is those windmills over there?
NILS HOOGE: I mean, you have the old technology and on the other side of the Oresund here and you have the future just to my left here. I mean, we are positioned here in a very interesting place actually. We have the past and the future in one view.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Ironically, the Swedish government, a fragile coalition of social democrats and anti-nuclear greens, agrees. That's why it decided in the teeth of fierce opposition from local voters to close the reactors at Barseback.
MARIE GRANLUND: I think it's very bad to be so dependent on the nuclear power. We have to have biomass, we have to have wind power, we have to have hydropower and so on, and of course the sun cells is very interesting. If you don't - as long as you all only have the nuclear power, you don't try to get something else, and I think it's just when you say you have to close down then also you start to think about new things. So it's a process.
JONATHAN HOLMES: But the big power companies haven't lost faith in nuclear. At Vattenfall's headquarters in Stockholm they told me they are investing $1,000,000,000 upgrading the remaining 10 reactors to replace the capacity lost at Barseback. They are betting that the politicians will soon have to fall in line with a pro-nuclear public opinion.
NILS ANDERSSON: You can see now very clear is that the climate change problem is the new environmental problem and that that's why we can now see that some of the political parties that were against nuclear are changing their minds in those days and I think that we will come up with a result that we can use our units as long as they are safe and profitable.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So the change in the physical climate is changing the political climate?
NILS ANDERSSON: Yes, I think so. I think so.
JONATHAN HOLMES: If the political climate is changing in Australia too, the public is still deeply distrustful of nuclear power. Witness the fear and fury surrounding the vexed issue of nuclear waste. Australia's record on nuclear waste is not encouraging. Since it was opened 40 years ago, much of the spent fuel from the Lucas Heights reactor has been shipped to France and Britain for reprocessing. Eventually the residue, by then classified as intermediate waste, will be returned to Australia. The first shipment is due in 2011. Instead of developing a well-thought out plan for its permanent disposal, state, territory and federal governments have spent most of that time exchanging insulting, and they still are.
BRENDAN NELSON: There is absolutely no room for mucking about now and we're certainly not going to be held hostage by political parochialism.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Northern Territory will be an unwilling host to the Commonwealth's low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste because South Australia adamantly refused to accept a national repository at Woomera.
BRENDAN NELSON: I think it's an absolute disgrace and a shameful reflection on the leadership of the South Australian government that at a place, Woomera, far, far distant from any large population centre there was proposed to be a low-level and intermediate-level storage facility, that that was so strongly opposed where the state government is enthusiastically wanting to get uranium out of the ground at Olympic Dam and have it exported overseas in my view is completely hypocrisy.
PETER GARRETT: The proposals for burial were frankly pretty paltry. I mean, it wasn't like it was going to be, you know, contained in the best technologies with the most careful prudence that Australia could ever deliver. I mean, it was a five-metre trench out in the bush. I mean, it was an outrage and the people of South Australia had every right to be up in arms about it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors poses the most formidable problem for the advocates of nuclear power. So far the English-speaking world has been notably bad at dealing with it. At Britain's Sellafield reprocessed waste accumulates in the cooling ponds. After 50 years there's still no agreement on where or how to dispose of it, and the funds to do so have been spent propping up the nuclear industry.
In the United States the federal government wants to bury thousands of cubic metres of high-level waste in Yucca Mountain. The state and people of Nevada are determined to stop it, and geologists now say the rock might not be suitable anyway.
But in the pretty harbour city of Askarshamn, on the Baltic coast south of Stockholm, the deep rock laboratory where they are testing their plan to bury Sweden's nuclear waste forever is a tourist attraction and most people seem unconcerned at the prospect.
MAN: If they say it's not dangerous then we have to believe them. I trust them.
WOMAN: I trust the staff we have and their knowledge of everything and I think it's very good.
WOMAN: I'm not afraid of it.
WOMAN: No comment.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Most, though of course not all. You don't think it's a good idea?
WOMAN: No, I don't think so. I don't like it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: If the Swedes have a high degree of trust in their engineers, it's been earned over time. The country's treatment of its nuclear waste is typically thorough. All radioactive waste is transported by sea in a purpose-built ship, the Sigyn, to one of two destinations.
At Forsmark, north of Stockholm, the low- and intermediate-level waste is offloaded and placed for permanent storage in an elaborate series of tunnels burrowed into the granite bedrock.
The high-level waste, mainly the spent fuel elements from the reactors, is far too hot to be buried. In containers capable of withstanding its 300-degree heat, it's brought here to CLAB, the central interim storage facility near Oskarshamn. The containers are opened under water, the fuel elements are removed, and then lowered 100 metres down to giant storage pools, themselves 30 metres deep, constructed in caverns carved out of the bedrock and seated on earthquake proof insulators. And there they must stay, I was told by Brita Freudnethal of CLAB, gradually cooling and losing some of their radioactivity for 30 or 40 years.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: This is somewhere about 4,200 tonnes of used fuel and it comes from 12 different nuclear plants.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So that represents 50 per cent of Sweden's electricity for 30 years.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: Yes, really, and this is all of it.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Like the Americans, the Swedes decided not to reprocess their spent fuel for fear the resulting plutonium could be misused. That means they have a large quantity of highly radioactive waste to dispose of. It will be toxic to the biosphere for at least 1,000 years, and more radioactive than normal rock for a 100,000 more.
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: You have eight metres between the surface of the water and the surface of the storage canisters.
JONATHAN HOLMES: So is there any radiation coming out to us here at all?
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: No, and you could take a swim, it wouldn't hurt you.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Is that right?
BRITA FREUDNETHAL: As long as you didn't swallow the water.
JONATHAN HOLMES: While the fuel cools off, the Swedes have had three decades to plan what to do with it next. They don't do things by halves. The granite bedrock in their country is at least 900,000,000 years old. They intend to drive a five-kilometre long tunnel through it, big enough to accommodate massive trucks, to a depth of 500 metres. At the bottom will be a whole network of further tunnels, with holes bored ready for the spent fuel canisters. Each canister made of solid copper that cannot corrode will be surrounded by bentonite clay, which will expand when wet, holding the canister's rigidly in place. Then the tunnels will be backfilled right back to the surface.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: Okay, we are here.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And to make sure the concept will work, the Swedes have dug themselves a deep rock laboratory five kilometres long and 500-metres deep.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: So beware, there's a step there. So now we are at the 340 level and we will actually walk quite a long way down.
JONATHAN HOLMES: And walk we did, through the dripping bedrock. Matthias Karlsson was keen that I understand the innumerable experiments that are being conducted down here. Some of them take years.
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: This is an experiment giving us knowledge of how long we will have free oxygen in the tunnel system, which is very important for corrosion around the copper canister.
JONATHAN HOLMES: This place, I kept reminding myself, is not where they are actually planning to bury the waste. It's just a laboratory. They have two possible sites, and when they have made a final decision they will bore a whole new set of tunnels through the rock.
What's the magical property of bentonite? Why's that special?
MATTHIAS KARLSSON: Because the bentonite sucks up water, until it's been saturated, and when it's done that it's very hard for water to move around the copper canister.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Swedes calculate that the entire exercise, the temporary storage at CLAB, the deep rock laboratory and the final disposal of all the fuel used by the current reactors will cost around $12,000,000,000. Most of the money is already in the bank, accumulated at the rate of about one-fifth of a cent per kilowatt hour, ever since the reactors first started back in the 1970s.
ANDERS SJOLAND: We have a good confidence that this system would work. But of course we are humble. We still will maintain the research and the vigilance for a long time and if something would show that something is wrong, then of course we have to start anew. So it's a big effort, yes, but as this issue is so important and as the time frame is so enormous, this effort has to be done in order to make a clear safety case for future generations.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The Finns are working on much the same solution as the Swedes, in much the same billion-year-old bedrock. But how many other nuclear nations will be so organised? Will China be? Will India? Would Australia do better than Britain has done? Certainly not right now.
BRENDAN NELSON: It may be that economically and environmentally that nuclear power doesn't stack up for us. But I think we ought to have a serious look at it. And I have been dealing with hysteria from some of the state and territory governments in relation to the long-term safe storage of low-level and intermediate-level nuclear waste, and if that's a taste of what we face in trying to have any sort of sane discussion about nuclear power then it's difficult to see how we are going to get through it.
PETER GARRETT: The decision that people have to make and the governments have to make is whether they want to, in a sense, invest both their faith, their finances and their future in a system that is expensive and produces poison. That's really what they have got to work out, and the trade-off that's given is, well, if we don't do that we are going to keep on polluting the planet. Now I think that's a false choice because there are other necessary and urgent things that we should do to stop polluting the planet, and building nuclear power plants is not the answer.
JONATHAN HOLMES: There's no unanimity about nuclear energy in Sweden either. Some people have always wanted to be rid of it. But the one thing I found that nobody wanted was coal-fired electricity. People think of that as poison. Everyone fears what they don't know more than what they do. And those who think Australia should be persuaded to stop worrying and love the atom have a long, hard road ahead of them.