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Meddling in the KBS Programme and

Swedish Success in Nuclear Waste Management

Mark Elam and Göran Sundqvist

(University of Gothenburg and University of Oslo)

mark.elam@sts.gu.se - goran.sundqvist@tik.uio.no

Paper prepared for the conference Managing Radioactive Waste: Problems and

Challenges in a Globalizing World, University of Gothenburg 15th – 17th December 2009

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Introduction

In recent years, the Swedish nuclear waste management programme has gained a reputation,

for being more or less unique in its ability to continue moving forwards towards a safe long-

term solution of a problem which elsewhere has been deemed all but irresolvable. Only in

neighbouring Finland, does comparable progress appear to be being made. However, on

closer inspection we find that neighbouring success only serves to confirm Swedish

preeminence in the field, as the technology of geological disposal being deployed in Finland –

the so-called KBS-3 methodi – is of Swedish origin (Posiva 2003). That other countries see

the Swedish nuclear waste management programme as exemplary received further

confirmation in 2005 when SKB, the industry body co-ordinating Swedish efforts, was asked

to supply the reference repository concept for the new look UK high-level waste management

programme (Nirex 2005a, 2005b). Taking their popularity a step further, SKB and their

Finnish equivalent Posiva, have been now asked by the European Commission, and a

collection of their fellow waste management agencies in Europe, to take the lead in co-

ordinating a European ‘Technology Platform’ for implementing the geological disposal of

radioactive waste (www.igdtp.eu). The aim of this new research, development and

demonstration (R,D &D) platform will be firstly to act as ‘a tool to support confidence-

building in the safety and implementation of deep geological disposal solutions’ which will be

‘to the benefit of all of Europe’ (www.igdtp.eu).

In this paper the intention is to analyse and re/describe the qualities that underlie the current

fame and good standing of Swedish nuclear waste management (the so-called KBS

Programme). Inspired by work in the actor-network theory tradition, we want to argue that the

success of the KBS Programme can be best accounted for with reference to qualities which

are the reverse of those you might otherwise expect. While you might imagine its good name

to be ascribable to the constancy, solidity and singularity of the solution being advanced, we

want to argue that it is rather the infidelity, fluidity and heterogeneity of this solution that can

best account for the leading position of Swedish nuclear waste management today. In fact, we

wish to assert that it is through the effacement of the inherent importance of the latter set of

qualities, that the KBS Programme has been able to promote a vision of itself as successfully

imbued with the former set.

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As a long-standing research, development and demonstration programme, what the Swedish

KBS Programme has succeeded in delivering for more than 30 years now is not an actual

long-term solution to the Swedish nuclear waste problem, so much as continuing proof and

confirmation of the practical attainability of such a solution by nuclear industry. In this way,

the KBS Programme can be described in actor-network terms as always having being more

concerned with the material semiotics of nuclear waste management, and the production of

hard and fast signs of the safe disposability of nuclear waste, rather than actual disposal itself.

The comparative advantage of such a focus continuing to prioritize production of material

confirmation of the feasibility and workability of the long-term waste management solution,

rather than the solution itself, is the room this leaves open for strategic manoeuvre and the

accommodation of new circumstances and unexpected events threatening the integrity and

viability of the solution being put forward.

Without embarking upon an extended analysis, the continuing ascendancy of the Swedish

KBS Programme as compared with the recent downfall, and perhaps permanent demise, of

the US Yucca Mountain Project may be explicable just in terms of the relative priority given

in each case to producing continual confirmation of the practical manageability of nuclear

waste, contra pressing unswervingly ahead with a chosen waste management solution.

Making use of actor-network theory, the vital difference between the two national endeavours

can be related to their varying degrees of mutability (Latour 1987, De Laet and Mol 2000). By

concentrating on upholding the Swedish nuclear industry’s ability to demonstratively confirm

the attainability of their waste management solution, the KBS Programme has been drawn

into valuing mutability, while by prioritizing the actual finalization of a non-negotiable

solution, the Yucca Mountain Project has been drawn into over-investing in immutability.

The Yucca Mountain Project as a national waste management programme, synonymous with

a unique geological formation, resembles an immutable immobile, while the KBS Programme

synonymous with a flexible concept for the deep geological disposal of spent fuel and/or

high-level waste, continues to approximate a mutable mobile – a travelling road show moving

between a collection of key, and still potentially expandable venues. Paradoxically, just

through tempering the urge towards immutability, and remaining simultaneously hard and

elastic, the KBS Programme finds itself in a situation today where its nuclear waste

management solutions appear more deeply carved in bedrock than the embattled Yucca

Mountain repository project.

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In the next section we shall establish further how mobilizing actor-network theory can open

up for a new meddlesome interpretation of Swedish success in nuclear waste management.

Thereafter, we shall embark on a thematised review of the life and times of the KBS

Programme starting with a discussion of its prehistory, and early years during the 1970s. Then

we shall address the development of the KBS Programme as resembling the invention of

‘good nuclear governance’ before the term governance had achieved popularity as a way

talking about new forms of ‘governing with government’ (Rhodes 1996). However, we shall

also discuss the dangers of too quickly reading the KBS Programme as founded upon a clear-

cut ‘principal-agent’ relation. Next we shall discuss the development of the KBS Programme

in terms of a progressive liberation of nuclear waste management technology from geology.

This will be presented as of central importance for both the survival and continuing extension

in time and space of SKB’s ability to demonstrate the safe disposability of nuclear waste

within reach. Finally, we shall provide a summary of our alternative analysis of Swedish

success in nuclear waste management in more explicit actor-network theory terms.

Actor-Network Theory: Translations and Interference

For better of worse, actor-network theory treats everything in nature and culture as emerging

out of the web of relations within which it is situated. It assumes that nothing can survive

outside of the network of relations sustaining it, and ‘acting it out’. Thus, according to this

relational ontology nothing can be ultimately seen as speaking, or standing up, for itself

(Latour 2005, Law 2007). When we are confronted with things that evidently do, actor-

network theory offers us two options; either we can accept these things as we find them and

become yet another intermediary helping them to enlarge their grip on reality, or

alternatively, we can open up Pandora’s box and become a mediator interested in meddling

in, and interfering with, the extended web of relations generating unquestionability (Latour

2005).

A key sensibility that actor-network theory asks us to embrace is the continual precariousness

of things. Things are only as durable as the networks of relations enacting them. When the

thing in question is an invention struggling to establish itself, its precariousness is particularly

acute. To survive an invention must forge new relations, and enter into worlds where it

currently has no place. To describe this process of moving into new worlds and becoming a

part of them, actor-network theory sets great store by the notion of translation (Callon 1986,

Brown 2002). To translate is to overcome difference and achieve equivalence. To become real

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and meaningful, and avoid stillbirth, any invention - be it an alternative hairstyle; an electric

car; a medical vaccine or a geological repository for nuclear waste - must be communicable

and translatable. Every translation, however, can be seen as coming at a price, and a partial

shift in meaning. So while translations are unavoidable and inescapable, if things are to

become more firmly established and accepted, they also bring discomfort as some measure of

transformation and infidelity must be tolerated in the process. So when an invention is

translated into a new world it will always go to some degree ‘off message’; remaining the

same, but still not (Brown 2002). In conventional narratives of technical change, the trials and

tribulations of translation tend to be effaced through reference to ‘development work’ or

‘incremental innovation’ further improving upon the original design. This implies that

inventions have an underlying coherence, and avoids acknowledging that their makeup,

significance and workability lies entirely in the hands of all those associated with them,

carrying them forth and extending and prolonging their existence (De Laet and Mol 2000,

Law 1997, 2007).

Translations are potentially high tension affairs. They can proceed smoothly or fail totally, as

if the soundness or absurdity of an invention speaks for itself. On the other hand, they can

give rise to prolonged and nervy periods of partial and incomplete translation. How much

transformation can those currently associated with an invention tolerate in order to guarantee

its continued existence? How can new associations with intermediaries willing to

unquestioningly carry forth an invention be secured; at the same time as close encounters with

excessively meddling mediators are kept at bay? How can a state of preparedness be

maintained for an unexpected breakdown in translation, and the sudden transformation of

expected intermediaries into troublesome mediators, or downright destructive elements? In

what follows, we shall seek to show the pregnancy of such issues for advancing a keener

understanding of the Swedish sources of success in nuclear waste management.

So another way of expressing the aim of this paper is to say that we are seeking to establish a

new association between actor-network theory and Swedish nuclear waste management in

order to introduce a new measure of noise and interference into a signal success story. As

shall be discussed below, the KBS Programme was established in the 1970s by the Swedish

nuclear industry in order to demonstrate the manageability of nuclear waste as a means to

validate nuclear new build (KBS 1977). Because the completion of a 12 reactor programme

was indeed permitted in Sweden during the first half of the 1980s (despite an accompanying

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government commitment to phasing out these reactors after 25 years of operation) the KBS

Programme must be seen as having largely achieved what it initially set out to do. Therefore,

what the KBS Programme firstly invented at the beginning of the 1980s was not a solution to

Swedish nuclear waste problem, so much as an effective way of demonstrating the practical

attainability of such a solution: A real solution to the waste problem unquestionably within

the nuclear industry’s grasp.

After 1984, building upon its initial success, the KBS Programme has been ostensibly

dedicated to progressively implementing what it has already shown to be attainable. On the

other hand, and as shall be argued here, its paramount concern can be seen as always having

been that of securing its own survival through the refinement of its ability to demonstrate an

indubitable solution to Sweden’s nuclear waste problem close at hand. It is just the struggle

for self-preservation that has exerted the greatest influence over the chain of translations

enacting and re-enacting the KBS Programme over time and space. In order to continue

demonstrating a long-standing promise on the sure path to fulfilment, the KBS Programme

has been forced to entertain translations and new associations radically transforming the

makeup and direction of the solution being proposed. However, due to the effacement of the

strategic importance of its continuing mutability, it can appear as if the KBS Programme is

closer than ever today to implementing the same, mature and fully-developed technological

solution to the Swedish waste problem it has been perfecting since the late 1970s.

The Birth of the KBS Programme

Nuclear waste management in Sweden corresponds with the pursuit of Kärnbränslesäkerhet

(KBS) which literally translates as ‘nuclear fuel safety’. So while this pursuit has been made,

and accepted as, equivalent to what is elsewhere termed nuclear waste management, it is still

worth asking how it might be understood as at least partially different. In order to do this it is

necessary to address the origins of the KBS Programme.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the issue of nuclear waste and its management/disposal hardly

existed in Sweden. The key matter of concern seen as determining the future of the nuclear

industry was instead that of nuclear fuel supply – Kärnbränsleförsörjning (KBF). It was not

appropriate to think about how to dispose of the left-overs, when you were still struggling to

supply the ingredients for the largest industrial meal ever prepared in the country. Following a

parliamentary decision in 1972, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel Supply Company (SKBF) was

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created as a joint venture between the country’s reactor owners. The task of this new company

was to co-ordinate the national inflow and outflow of reactor fuel, and to keep Swedish

nuclear fuel cycles smoothly turning as new reactors were commissioned. Regards Sweden’s

first light-water reactor brought into operation in 1972, a contract had been signed already in

1967 with the United States Atomic Energy Commission guaranteeing supplies of enriched

uranium for fuel fabrication (Kjellman 2000: 16, see also Gimstedt 1995). Similarly, a

contract for the reprocessing of the spent fuel from this first reactor was negotiated at an early

date with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL). Whether or not, the uranium and plutonium

extracted through reprocessing would be returned to Sweden or sold off remained an open

question, while it was taken for granted that all of the wastes associated with reprocessing

would be taken care of by BNFL as part of the service they provided (SOU 1976: 32 p.26).

Nuclear waste management, therefore, was seen as a partly exportable problem during the

1970s in Sweden and something more tightly coupled with nuclear reprocessing, than with

nuclear power generation per se. However, that Sweden should also start engaging in

reprocessing (and thereby long-term high-level waste management) as soon as possible to

guarantee long-term security of nuclear fuel supply was something proposed by the first

Government Committee of Inquiry on Spent Nuclear Fuel and Radioactive Waste (the so-

called AKA Inquiry) in 1976. According to this inquiry, SKBF should take immediate

responsibility for the planning and siting of a Swedish reprocessing plant. Any decision to

construct such a plant should also include plans for both a plutonium fuel fabrication plant

and a central stockpile of spent fuel supported by a spent fuel transport system. Furthermore,

joint location of a reprocessing plant and a terminal storage facility for the geological disposal

of the high-level waste from reprocessing was also deemed advantageous to avoid long waste

transports. Two favoured sites were mentioned by the AKA Inquiry for co-location of a

reprocessing plant and a geological disposal facility: the reactors sites in Oskarshamn and

Östhammar (SOU 1976: 32 pp. 9-14).

As it turned out, however, 1976 was also to be the year when ‘fuel safety’ superseded ‘fuel

supply’ as the most important aspect of nuclear fuel management demanding immediate

concerted action. The new coalition bourgeois government that came to power in Sweden in

1976 was hopelessly divided over the future of nuclear power. However, the new Prime

Minister, Thorbjörn Fälldin and his Centre Party remained unflinching in their commitment to

phasing out a national reactor programme which was still only half completed. They were

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convinced that the waste issue was the Achilles Heel of the nascent nuclear industry, and that

through the introduction of new legislation it would be possible to fully expose this weakness.

Therefore, the Nuclear Power Stipulation Act passed in February 1977, was hoped by Fälldin

and his allies to constitute a mission impossible for the Swedish nuclear industry where their

palpable failure was guaranteed (Anshelm 2006: chp 3, Sundqvist 2002: chp 4). What the

Stipulation Act mercilessly stipulated was that reactor owners must show exactly how and

where spent fuel can be disposed of with absolute safety before permission can be granted to

fuel any further reactors. More specifically, reactor owners had to either:

1. Present a contract that adequately provides for the reprocessing of spent fuel and also show

how and where the final deposition of the highly radioactive waste resulting from

reprocessing can be effected with absolute safety, or

2. Show how and where the spent but not reprocessed nuclear fuel can be finally stored with

absolute safety (SFS 1977: 140, see also Johansson and Steen 1981: 35).

So Swedish nuclear waste management was born out of a highly adversarial situation where

the underlying issue was the fuelling or wasting of the nuclear industry itself. The successful

introduction of the spectre of an irresolvable waste problem, obliged the nuclear industry to

make a detour, and branch into a new field of endeavour which they chose to name ‘nuclear

fuel safety’. A field which represented both an extension of their existing concern with

nuclear fuel supply, but also its qualitative transformation. The first alternative for

demonstrating absolute safety kept alive the hope that the industrial detour would only be a

minor one, where the development of new waste management technologies would continue to

follow in the train of already proposed innovations in nuclear fuel supply, and the pursuit of

ever more advanced and sophisticated fuel cycles. The second alternative, on the other hand,

suggested the effective curtailment of established plans for innovations in nuclear fuel supply

and a closer correspondence between nuclear fuel safety and the disposal and wasting of what

otherwise would have served as a material foundation for the further development of a

Swedish nuclear fuel supply industry (Elam and Sundqvist 2009).

As it turned out, by obliging the Swedish reactor owners to present a contract with an already

existing reprocessor, the Stipulation Act effectively terminated all plans for prioritizing the

development of a Swedish reprocessing plant together with a high-level waste disposal

facility. While the KBS Programme’s first attempt to satisfy the Stipulation Act, KBS-1,

chose to build on the established practice of having Swedish reactor fuel reprocessed abroad

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(KBS 1977), it became increasingly apparent that the availability of such reprocessing

services was nothing that could be guaranteed. Mass protests disrupted plans for the

construction of a new reprocessing plant in Germany in the late 1970s and the acceptability of

reprocessing in the UK and France became dependent upon the introduction of return-to-

sender clauses guaranteeing the repatriation of high-level wastes after reprocessing (Blowers

et al 1991). Added to these difficulties afflicting the development of nuclear fuel supply in

Europe, came the decision of the new Carter Administration in 1977 to ban nuclear

reprocessing in the United States in order to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation

based on plutonium derivable from spent reactor fuel (Anshelm 2006: 79, Martinez 2002).

Although the KBS-1 recipe for nuclear fuel safety, originally submitted in December 1977 in

order to gain permission to fuel Sweden’s seventh reactor, was provisionally accepted by

government authority in March 1979, the simultaneous occurrence of the Three Mile Island

accident in the United States put everything on hold and brought renewed vulnerability to the

Swedish reactor programme (Anshelm 2006: 94). A national referendum was triggered, and

instead of trial by government stipulation, the decision to continue fuelling the Swedish

nuclear power programme or not was suddenly left hanging on a popular vote. The

overwhelming collapse of public confidence in nuclear power in Sweden during the course of

the 1970s was confirmed by the fact that all of the voting options in the 1980 referendum

supported a phasing out of nuclear power; the only question was whether this should take

place sooner rather than later (Anshelm 2006: 95-101). So while, the winning line in the

referendum represented a defeat for the Swedish anti-nuclear movement in that it allowed for

the completion of a 12 reactor programme (still conditional upon demonstrations of absolute

nuclear fuel safety), it still represented a victory for them in that it led to the establishment of

a fixed timetable for the decommissioning of each and everyone of these reactors after 25

years of operation. Thus, it was planned that by 2010 Sweden should be quit of nuclear power

as the nuclear industry’s own nuclear fuel safety programme reached completion. Therefore,

while four days after the referendum, KBS-1 (encompassing the reprocessing of spent fuel)

was finally confirmed by the Swedish government as an authoritative recipe for absolute

nuclear fuel safety, allowing for a queue of four reactors to be brought into immediate

operation, the association between the KBS Programme and further advances in nuclear fuel

supply had been effectively severed (Sundqvist 2002: 94). The detour in the development of

the Swedish nuclear industry implied by the enforced pursuit of nuclear fuel safety had turned

into a U-turn. Instead of validating the fuelling of new reactors, the overriding long-term

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objective of the KBS Programme after 1980 switched to that of assuring the safest possible

burial of the Swedish nuclear industry. An industry moving fast forward had made an about

turn and found itself entrusted with developing and demonstrating the highest standards of

performance in the technologies of its own burial.

In 1984, the Act on Nuclear Activities replaced the Stipulation Act. The intentionally

confrontational demand for ’absolute’ safety was toned down and moderated (even though

KBS-1 had been ultimately accepted as fulfilling this ’mission impossible’ directly after the

1980 referendum). The new Act re-confirmed that the reactor owners themselves were to be

held responsible for diligently pursuing a ’comprehensive research and development

programme’ guaranteeing the safe handling, interim storage and domestic geological disposal

of the spent fuel from Sweden’s nuclear power plants. However, a new paragraph was

introduced in 1987 after Chernobyl expressly forbidding any plans or new designs to be

produced promoting the construction of additional reactors in Sweden (Andersson-Skog

2005: 26). This legally-binding measure making nuclear new build literally unthinkable in

Sweden after the mid-80s, corroborated the identity of the KBS Programme as not just a

nuclear waste management programme, but also a burial programme for the nuclear industry

itself. Given this situation, nuclear industry control over the design and implementation of

nuclear waste management solutions has continued to remain relatively uncontroversial, so

long as new build has stayed a dormant issue.

The Invention of ‘Good Nuclear Governance’ Before its Time?

In retrospect, it can be said that while the 1977 Stipulation Act was originally intended by an

anti-nuclear Prime Minister to present the Swedish nuclear industry with its own nemesis, its

long-term effect has been to render nuclear waste management equivalent to a field for the

practice of what these days is often termed ‘good governance’, or ‘corporate social and

environmental responsibility’ (Rhodes 1996, Rose 1999: 16). Originally hoped by opponents

of the nuclear industry to be able isolate, shame and scandalize the nuclear industry for

lacking a viable solution to the waste problem, the Stipulation Act has ended up giving rise to

a lasting set of arrangements, further codified in the 1984 Act on Nuclear Activities, where

the State is formally to remain at the helm steering nuclear waste management, while industry

is tasked with both inventing and delivering the solutions themselves.

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In effect, the Stipulation Act can be viewed as having acted as a particularly potent

technology policy measure, sabotaging further Swedish innovation in nuclear fuel supply,

while successfully stimulating spontaneous and continuous innovation in nuclear waste

management and disposal. By way of contrast, the recommendations of the 1976 Flowers

Report, for the fast-tracking of waste management plans in the UK did little to halt the

continued expansion of nuclear reprocessing including the construction of the notorious

THORP plant commissioned in 1994 (Walker 2000). While BNFL came through the 1970s

and 80s relatively unscathed, SKBF their fledgling sister organization in Sweden, experienced

death and reincarnation at the beginning of the 1980s as they were divorced from the

development of advanced nuclear fuel cycles and transformed into the Swedish Nuclear Fuel

and Waste Management Company (SKB)ii. A technological flagship initially setting sail for

the ‘plutonium economy’ in the 1970s, effectively metamorphosed after 1984 into a cutting

edge grave-digger implementing the Swedish nuclear industry’s own phased and stepwise

burial.

If the connection between the KBS Programme and the safe burial of nuclear power in

Sweden has been subject to attenuation after 1984, this has firstly taken place through

growing uncertainties over the timing of a nuclear phase out in Sweden. While after

Chernobyl, a shortening of the operational lifespan of the two Barsebäck reactors was decided

upon by the Swedish government, a further government decision in 1997 abolished the

deadline of 2010 for the complete phase out of nuclear power in the interests of long-term

economic stability (Andersson-Skog 2005: 27). As a result of this change of plan, 10 out of

12 of Sweden’s reactors remain in operation today still awaiting the economic conditions

allowing for their closure. Recently, it has been estimated that with careful maintenance and

minor improvements, these 10 remaining reactors should be able to be kept in operation for

60 years before they reach technical obsolescence (Svenska Dagbladet 27/11/07). In February

2009, the original parliamentary opponents of nuclear power in Sweden, the Centre Party,

took an historic step in reversing their position on nuclear new build. They have now aligned

themselves with the other bourgeois alliance parties supporting the replacement of all reactors

upon obsolescence with a new fleet of up to 10 on the same sites (Svenska Dagbladet 6/2/09).

The Social Democrats, Green Party and Left Party, on the other hand, currently remain

committed to a nuclear phase out, to be implemented as new energy sources become available

(Dagens Nyheter 22/03/09).

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Given this situation, the ambiguity of the KBS Programme has been heightened once more.

Still intelligible as a burial programme for the nuclear industry, it is also once again

understandable today as a programme validating new build prior to its initiation. However,

before we carry on crediting the KBS Programme with having given rise to good nuclear

governance validating either the safe fuelling, or safe burial of Swedish nuclear power, it is

worth interrogating the separation of State from industry upon which it is founded. Here

again, while this separation can appear as having remained an unequivocal pillar of the KBS

Programme throughout its duration, it can also be seen as never having been this, but rather a

continually fluid and shifting relational assemblage.

Since the mid-1970s, the KBS programme is formally based on a governmental demand to

see a genuine solution to the nuclear waste problem, combined with an obligation on the part

of the nuclear industry to show it. As equivalent to a model of accountability (Power 1991),

the Swedish government and its attendant authorities perform through the KBS Programme

the role of a ‘principal’, while the nuclear industry and its collective representative, SKB, are

cast as an ‘agent’. While SKB acts as a free agent, the government maintains claims upon

their conduct through the contractual arrangements codified in the Act on Nuclear Activities.

The key body policing these arrangements today is the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority

(SSM) which came into existence during 2008 through the merger of the two prior state

authorities – the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) and the Swedish Radiation

Protection Authority (SSI). It is SSM’s job to uphold the principal-agent relation by

continuing to specify what exactly SKB needs to show, as well as by subsequently verifying

what exactly has been shown. Thus, SSM can be seen to be enacting ‘hands-off control’ over

a nuclear industry that has been obliged to take full responsibility for the safe handling and

disposal of its own fuel/waste. The means available to SSM for assuring SKB’s compliance is

firstly the tight control they are able to exercise over the funding of nuclear waste

management. Each year SSM recalculates the current and long-term costs of taking care of all

of the wastes resulting from Sweden’s nuclear power programme and imposes a charge on

industry accordingly. These financial resources, held in a National Nuclear Waste Fund, serve

as ransom money which SSM can withhold from SKB should they fail to show the progress

required of them at any specific juncture (Andersson-Skog 2005, Elam and Sundqvist 2009).

However, while Swedish nuclear waste management may appear to act out a principal and

agent storyline, this relation can also be viewed as anything but clear-cut. It maybe so that

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Thorbjörn Fälldin and the leading opponents of nuclear power during the 1970s wanted to use

the Stipulation Act to roll back the state, dissociating it from the nuclear industry, in order to

stage a public ‘show trial’ exposing a neglected waste problem. However, already by this

time, state involvement with the development of nuclear technology in Sweden was so

thorough-going and multi-faceted, that to break it off at will was simply not an option. For

this reason, just as much as rolling back the state; the establishment and growth of the KBS

Programme has represented a continuous rolling forward of the Swedish state into an ever

more complex and fluid set of relations with an ever expanding range of actors both within

and beyond Sweden’s borders (Elam and Sundqvist 2009).

It was the Swedish state in league with a domestic cadre of nuclear scientists that originally

hatched plans to develop nuclear technology from the late 1940s onwards. An Atomic

Commission in 1955 set out the so-called ‘Swedish Path’, encompassing the exploitation of

Swedish low-grade uranium reserves; heavy-water reactors, reprocessing and the

development of an independent nuclear weapons capability (Sundqvist 2002: chp 3).

However, even as these plans were overtaken and replaced by a commercial light-water

reactor programme focussing on power generation alone, the level of state involvement

remained high. At the centre of the light-water reactor programme stood the State Power

Board, otherwise known as Vattenfall. Founded in 1909, Vattenfall was established by the

Swedish State to co-ordinate the effective development of hydro-electric power in the north of

the country in support of the nation’s industrialization. Already in the 1950s, nuclear power

was identified by Vattenfall as a way of taking Swedish power generation into the ‘post-hydro

era’ (Kaijser 1992: 447). Implementing this vision, a nuclear ‘development block’ emerged

during the 1960s and 1970s centring on renewed collaboration between Vattenfall and their

long-standing industrial partner, the Swedish electrical equipment company ASEA (lately

ABB). Quite miraculously, in a relatively short space of time, ASEA Atomiii with Vattenfall

as its most important customer developed into an independent producer of light water reactors

operating in direct competition with industrial giants like Westinghouse, General Electric and

Siemens (Gimstedt 1995, Kaijser 1992). ASEA Atom ended up supplying 9 out of 12 of

Sweden’s reactors as well as two to the Finnish power consortium TVO.

So when the Stipulation Act tasked industry with delivering absolute nuclear fuel safety, the

industry being tasked was to a large degree state-owned industry. Two of the original three

leaders of the KBS Programme were both representatives from Vattenfall (KBS 1977: 17).

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Therefore, while formally appearing to be based on a principal-agent style divide between

state and industry, the KBS Programme has in reality always been composed of a steadily

expanding organizational imbroglio of state and non-state actors (including voluntary

actors/stakeholders) whose true identities and relations to each other have continued to remain

largely shifting and opaque. Not uncommonly, individuals pursuing successful careers in

nuclear waste management in Sweden, do not stick with principal or agent throughout their

working lives, but rather follow different trajectories moving through the actor-network

constituting Swedish nuclear waste management as a sprawling whole.

While SKB are still declared as being a Swedish company, this must now be seen as not

entirely accurate. As a result of the liberalisation of the European energy market during the

1990s, Sweden’s nuclear reactors are now subject to interlocking multinational ownership.

The three companies effectively sharing ownership of these reactors today, and thereby of

SKB as well, are Vattenfall, Fortum and E.ON. After becoming a public limited company in

1992, continuing State ownership has not prevented Vattenfall from steadily expanding their

operations in Finland, Denmark, Germany, Poland and Holland including the acquisition of

majority interests in two German nuclear power plants. Fortum who hold significant interests

in two Swedish reactor sites resemble Vattenfall in that they are 50% owned by the Finnish

State. As, in addition to their Swedish interests, Fortum also owns one of Finland’s reactor

sites and have a minority interest in the other, it is not surprising to find that they also hold a

40% share in Posiva who are SKB’s sister organization in Finland. Given Fortum’s roughly

25% share in SKB, it is again, not surprising to find that SKB and Posiva have been pursuing

joint research projects for many years now, following the latter’s decision to imitate SKB and

adopt the KBS-3 concept as the guiding concept for the geological disposal of Finland’s spent

nuclear fuel as well. E.ON with interests in all three of Sweden’s reactor sites is currently the

largest privately owned energy company in Europe with head offices in Düsseldorf. With

growing markets in the United States and Russia, E.ON is currently guided by the vision of

becoming the world’s leading company within gas and electricity.

Therefore, even prior to recent efforts by the European Commission to help bring into being a

European ‘Technology Platform’ for implementing the geological disposal of nuclear waste

significant strides have been already taken towards establishing such a platform. These strides

have corresponded firstly with the growing entanglement of private and state-owned nuclear

industries in Sweden and Finland with each other resulting in the elevation of KBS 3 into a

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Baltic platform for the geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Thereafter, as state-owned

Vattenfall have bought their way into the German nuclear industry, and as E.ON have

acquired a major share in the Swedish nuclear industry, so the KBS Programme has

approached equivalence to a European showcase programme in the geological disposal of

nuclear waste on the Baltic Rim (Elam and Sundqvist 2009).

The Liberation of KBS from Geology and Local Political Protest

Again in retrospect, another way to think of the development of the KBS Programme is in

terms of the long-term industrialization of nuclear waste management as nuclear fuel safety.

The 1977 Stipulation Act was hoped by the opponents of nuclear power to expose an Achilles

heel, but in long-term effect it can now be seen as having acted as a highly potent government

technology and innovation policy. It gave birth to what is currently on the brink of becoming

a fully-fledged nuclear fuel safety industry capable of attending to the tasks of nuclear

decommissioning, nuclear phase-out, or the validation of new build in a range of different

international contexts. With the growing collaboration today of SKB with the Nuclear

Decommissioning Authority in the UK, the KBS Programme is building upon its past

experiences (KBS 1) of successfully demonstrating a safe repository concept for the

geological disposal of high-level waste. At the same time, SKB’s long-standing collaboration

with Posiva in Finland is continuing to confirm the transferability of the KBS 3 approach to

assuring safety in the direct disposal of spent fuel. Developing the mobility of nuclear fuel

safety solutions was not, however, a integral part of the KBS Programme from the outset. It

only became a key matter of concern as SKB set about trying to circumvent the substantial

difficulties they encountered when attempting to advance the siting of a KBS repository in

Sweden during the mid-1980s.

Responding to the 1977 Stipulation Act, the KBS Programme was initially encouraged to

treat the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of nuclear waste disposal as questions largely synonymous with

each other. The task of demonstrating the possibility of achieving absolute safety was clearly

seen as encompassing the task of pointing out at least one physically ideal location for waste

disposal to take place. Reflecting this, government approval of the KBS 1 concept was

initially denied in 1978 just because insufficient evidence had been provided of the existence

of the highly particular bedrock conditions needed for the permanent isolation of highly

radioactive wastes from the biosphere (Sundqvist 2002: 85). This problem was not easily

overcome, at this time, as there simply did not exist a body of established geological experts

16

willing and able to guarantee the safety of the newly proposed KBS concept anywhere in

Sweden without an extended period of further geoscientific research (Anshelm 2006: 91,

Sundqvist 2002: 91). Given this situation, government approval of the KBS-1 concept in 1980

had to be founded upon a high degree of confidence in the relative strength and integrity of

the other engineered barriers encompassed by the concept, combined with assurances from

the nuclear industry that the search for something that could be demonstrated as an ideal

geological home for the concept would continue apace (Sundqvist 2002: chp 5).

The partial freeing of ‘how’ from ‘where’, and nuclear waste management technology from

geology, that was won with the successful acquisition of government approval for KBS-1 in

1980, is something that has been significantly extended over time. While SKBF, becoming

SKB, started out by taking the search for a demonstrably ideal geological home for their KBS

concept very seriously at the beginning of the 1980s, they were forced within the space of a

few years to campaign once again for the further unshackling of the concept from geology. As

geological experts were successfully recruited and enrolled into the KBS Programme after

1980 and a nationwide programme of test-drillings covering a broad selection of rock types

was initiated another problem raised its head. Local ‘rescue groups’ formed in practically

every location where drillings were planned, joining together to form a national network of

communities intent on resisting invasion and potential colonization by the nuclear industry

(Lidskog 1994, Holmstrand 2001). The level of confrontation between SKB and local

communities steadily escalated culminating in the ‘Battle of Almunge’ in 1985 where police

and demonstrators clashed in a fashion which effectively served to curtail the continuation of

a geology-led siting policy for a KBS-3 repository (Anshelm 2006: 107, Holmstrand 2001:

29). Given the apparently insuperable difficulties facing a geology-led siting process, an

alternative approach had to be found.

The grounds for such an alternative siting process, toning down the importance of ideal

bedrock conditions, were laid in the research and development programme SKB submitted for

government inspection and approval in 1986. Here, it is argued that the limited geological

investigations already carried out had conclusively shown that ‘it is possible to find many

sites in Sweden that are suitable for the construction of a final repository’ (SKB 1986: 86).

Rather than continuing to focus efforts on a search for ideal bedrock, it is argued that long-

term nuclear fuel safety will be better served by efforts to further assure quality in the

technological construction of a repository. To this end, plans were announced to build a

17

prototype ‘dress rehearsal’ repository on the reactor site in Oskarshamn (SKB 1986: 35-37).

Given the palpably less than ideal bedrock conditions associated with the Äspö Hard Rock

Laboratory in Oskarshamn, this facility has, since its successful commissioning in 1995, also

been able to serve as a centre for further researching and physically demonstrating the degrees

to which imperfect bedrock can be compensated for through ingenious engineering (Elam and

Sundqvist 2009).

As locational degrees of freedom have been progressively won for the KBS-3 method, so it

has been possible to introduce new guiding principles into the siting process for a repository.

In 1992, SKB adopted the principle of local acceptability as the key factor deciding over the

siting of a KBS-3 repository. Sites for detailed investigation would no longer be selected

firstly on the basis of geological research, but following local pre-studies, or feasibility

studies, initiated by individual municipalities themselves through their volunteering to

participate in such a study in order to learn more about nuclear waste management and their

potential suitability for hosting a repository (SKB 1992a: 66, Lidskog and Sundqvist 2004). In

October 1992, SKB launched their new siting strategy by sending out a letter to each and

every municipality in Sweden asking for volunteers to participate in the siting of a KBS-3

repository (SKB 1992b). To begin with this new siting strategy appeared unsuccessful as, not

surprisingly, very few volunteer communities were forthcoming.

Established nuclear communities did not respond to SKB’s 1992 letter as they all deemed it

unnecessary for them to ‘volunteer’ to participate in the solution of a problem they saw

themselves already so closely connected to, and unable to avoid (Elam and Sundqvist 2007:

chp 7). However, by 1994, SKB were interested in singling out the nation’s established

nuclear communities as potentially ready-made local stakeholders in the resolution of the

Swedish waste problem. Hopefully, these communities would be able to supply a

combination of physically appropriate sites and ‘a local understanding and commitment’ to

working together with the nuclear industry towards the establishment of a KBS-3 repository

(SKB 1995: 2).

With the help of private consultants previously employed by SKB and SKI, the municipality

of Oskarshamn took the lead in approaching SKB’s turn to voluntarism as an opportunity for

local bootstrapping. Oskarshamn both demanded and won an allocation from the National

Nuclear Waste Fund enabling them, and other communities participating in the siting of a

18

KBS-3 repository, to invest in developing their own strategic understanding of nuclear waste

policy issues (Elam and Sundqvist 2007: chp 7). While offering the vast majority of

communities in Sweden an explicit opportunity to say yes or no to participating in the siting

of a KBS-3 repository proved to be of no advantage to SKB; directing such an opportunity at

a small minority has ended up paying great rewards. In the case of the established nuclear

communities of Oskarshamn and Östhammar, asking and encouraging both of them to take an

ever greater portion of their nuclear futures into their own hands after has 1995 proved to be a

highly successful recipe for guaranteeing SKB two safe havens within which they can

continue to elaborate upon and promote their ability for showing nuclear fuel safety within

palpable reach.

Nothing apparently creates entanglement better than empowerment, and armed with effective

powers of veto both Oskarshamn and Östhammar have over the last 15 years grown

accustomed to viewing a KBS-3 repository as a possible part of their future, providing that

the safety case for such a facility is approved by government, and that socio-economic

advantages for locality and the region can be assured. By first hosting local feasibility studies

in the mid-90s, and then by accepting SKB’s invitations to become the only two communities

going on to host geological site investigations after 2002, the relations of connection between

the municipalities of Oskarshamn and Östhammar and the KBS Programme have grown ever

stronger and closer. These relations of connection are simultaneously social and material. A

strong sense of identity with SKB has developed in both localities as both have evolved into

ever more elaborate research, development and demonstration sites for the successful long-

term completion of the KBS Programme, and the eventual establishment of a KBS 3

repository (Elam and Sundqvist 2007). Thus, while much publicity has followed SKB’s

announcement in June 2009, that the geology of the Östhammar site has shown itself to be

ultimately more favourable for the construction of a KBS-3 repository (Dagens Nyheter

03/06/09), this cannot be allowed to hide the fact that practically all of the key development

and demonstration facilities attached to such a repository are already established, or are

planned to be established, on the Oskarshamn reactor site.

The ability of SKB to translate KBS 3 into a movable, and thereby an apparently more

acceptable, workable and exportable, repository concept has depended upon the successful

combination of technical and political innovations. Persuasive demonstrations of the

enhanced integrity of the engineered barriers in the KBS 3 design have been performed, at the

19

same time as volunteerism, local stakeholder involvement, and guaranteed powers of

community veto have been shown capable of spawning local acceptability for repository

siting in two locations with relatively long-established and conflict-free experiences of

nuclear activities (Elam and Sundqvist 2007, 2009). Through such a combination of technical

and political practices, SKB have advertised to the world that a successful accommodation

between physical geology and political geography can be achieved when taking visible steps

towards implementing the geological disposal of nuclear waste.

Conclusions

This paper is intended to meddle in the KBS Programme and the current international high

standing of Swedish nuclear waste management. Drawing on the optics of actor-network

theory we wish to re-envision the success of the KBS Programme as relating firstly to its

infidelity, fluidity and heterogeneity, rather than its constancy, solidity and singularity. While

this programme has continually promised that a safe immutable and immobile solution to the

Swedish nuclear waste problem is within its reach, it has only been able to keep this promise

alive and kicking by remaining anything but immutable and immobile throughout its 30 year

or so history.

The KBS Programme began with the immediate translation of nuclear waste management by

the Swedish nuclear industry into nuclear fuel safety. SKB is dedicated to achieving KBS, but

this remains a capricious and fluid undertaking as it has never become entirely clear if the

underlying objective is to generate support for the fuelling or the wasting of Swedish nuclear

industry in the process. To begin with (KBS 1), the pursuit of nuclear fuel safety remained

clearly subordinate to the pursuit of continuing innovation in nuclear fuel supply. Spent

reactor fuel was not waste for direct disposal, instead it was firstly the highly radioactive

remnants of reprocessing that were to be waste managed. The obligation placed on industry to

prioritize KBS mediated on-going innovation in nuclear fuel supply without transforming it

beyond recognition. Following on from this, initial Swedish plans for the direct disposal spent

nuclear fuel without reprocessing (KBS 2) were not advanced in 1978 as a superior approach

to KBS 1, but rather as a fallback option. KBS 2 was only to be developed further if

continuing to prioritize innovations in nuclear fuel supply became impractical. By 1980 this is

exactly what had happened and plans for KBS 3 were initiated as a genuinely safer and more

defensible approach to nuclear fuel safety. At this point, after the mediation of the KBS

Programme by a national referendum on the future of nuclear power, its primary concern

20

shifted from the validation of nuclear new build to the directing of the nuclear industry’s own

burial procession. Although a highly uncomfortable transformation in the meaning and

significance of KBS for SKB, this served to turn anti-nuclear forces in Sweden into

intermediaries rather than mediators of the KBS Programme for many years to come. Why

protest further when the nuclear industry had become so intent on demonstrating expertise in

its own long-term dismantlement and burial? Thus, an unlikely source of success was

temporarily secured.

However, local protests against test drillings searching for a demonstrably ideal geological

location for a KBS 3 repository during the early 1980s led to the transformation of the KBS

Programme once again. Technical and political innovation were pursued side by side to

liberate KBS 3 from the spectre of ideal bedrock conditions and local protests simultaneously.

Volunteerism was used by SKB to seek out local intermediaries (local stakeholders)

potentially willing to work with the nuclear industry in their pursuit of nuclear fuel safety,

while eliminating all those other local mediators who risked denuding public confidence in

KBS 3 further. As the enhanced integrity of KBS 3’s engineered barriers was demonstrated

throughout the 1990s, so the KBS Programme developed a new association with the practice

of local corporate social and environmental responsibility on the established reactor sites in

Oskarshamn and Östhammar. In these locations, where it has been possible to balance the

advantages of physical geology and political geography for the pursuit of nuclear fuel safety,

a further transformation of the KBS Programme has been set in motion. Rather than

intimately tied to a national phase out of nuclear power; the researching, developing and

demonstrating of KBS in Oskarshamn and Östhammar appears to have laid the foundations

for a new international nuclear fuel safety industry. The initial transfer of KBS 3 to Finland

followed by the current elevation of Swedish and Finnish experiences into the bases for a

European ‘Technology Platform’ for implementing the geological disposal of radioactive

waste promises to extend the associability of the KBS Programme as never before.

The enduring template for Swedish nuclear waste management was established in 1977

through the Nuclear Stipulation Act. This gave rise to the cultivation of a new expertise

within the Swedish nuclear industry of demonstrating indubitable solutions to nuclear waste

problems close at hand. Thus, while it may appear that the KBS Programme has always been

about the conception, and step by step implementation of a completely coherent and largely

unvarying approach to the geological disposal of nuclear waste, this can be seen as effacing

21

another reality. Bringing this other reality back into view, we see that for the KBS

Programme, attaining the goal of the geological disposal of nuclear waste has never been as

important as maintaining the ability to demonstrate its attainability. The KBS Programme is

firstly a long-running programme in the material semiotics of nuclear fuel safety and the

production of palpable signs of the accomplishment of geological disposal close at hand. This

production of palpable signs has extended to the production of nuclear waste facilities

themselves which can be seen as firstly adding further weight and credibility to what has

already been demonstrated. The materialization of solutions in terms of copper canisters that

can be experimented on, or a ‘dress rehearsal’ repository that can be opened to the public, is

important for maintaining and enlarging SKB’s ability to demonstrate KBS within reach, but

remains nothing that should be rushed into. When KBS becomes too close to hand, and starts

to approximate an immutable mobile, it becomes harder to translate it into something else in

the face of challenging circumstance. Thus, the remarkable success of Swedish nuclear waste

management so far can be ultimately ascribed to an ability for continually producing signs of

a definite end to the implementation of geological disposal in sight, while never sacrificing

the capacity for showing this end undergoing necessary improvement and becoming

otherwise. Bearing this in mind, the best way to read SKB’s recent announcement of

Östhammar as their preferred site for a KBS 3 repository is as yet another powerful and

compelling sign of the attainability of nuclear fuel safety, not to be confused with its

attainment.

Notes i The KBS-3 method for the direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel is a ‘multiple barrier’ system

of geological disposal. It combines a copper canister with cast iron insert, together with a

buffer of bentonite clay, entombed in crystalline bedrock at a depth of 500m to keep the waste

isolated from the biosphere.

22

ii SKB stands for Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, which literally translates as the Swedish

Nuclear Fuel Management Company. So it is only in English that ’and Waste’ has been added

to SKB’s name. Given that SKB is dedicated to delivering waste management solutions as

KBS (nuclear fuel safety), the company appears to have been always opposed to honouring

the field of nuclear waste management with a name of its own, despite international praxis. iii ASEA’s nuclear section started developing a Swedish light water reactor in 1962. In 1969,

this section was merged with the state-owned Atomic Energy Company (which had been

responsible for the aborted heavy water reactor programme) to become ASEA Atom. In 1982,

ASEA purchased the Swedish state’s share in the company transforming it into a fully private

enterprise. Subsequently in 1988, ASEA Atom became ABB Atom as ASEA merged with the

Swiss company Brown Boveri. In 2000, ABB Atom was sold to BNFL and today the

company which continues to manufacture nuclear fuel in the Swedish city of Västerås is

owned by Westinghouse.

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