Finland’s nuclear power industry started with the Lovisa plant, a wedding between east and west nuclear technology. The Soviets supplied the reactor core and the rest was based on Westinghouse technology. I’m not sure if Finnish technology historians Tuomo Särkikoski and Karl-Erik Michelsen have yet managed to get a book in English published, but these enfants terribles of Finnish academia have been telling the hilarious tale of “Eastinghouse” in Finnish and Swedish to anybody who’ll listen. Gaining access to 16,000 pages of transcripts, design proposals, contracts and technical negotiation documents, they discovered how in the mid-1960s at the height of the Cold War a group of barely-old-enough-to-shave Finnish engineers ran rings around representatives of a top US nuke provider and aging nomenklatura from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in order to put together the kind of nuclear power plant they wanted. What makes the story so compelling is the single-mindedness of the young Finns’ engineering vision and the fact that they never made a peep in public about what they had been up to.
There is a mysterious quiet in the discussion of Finland’s longer-term nuclear plans, even as the country’s politicians contemplate construction of a very plain-vanilla sixth reactor. Given the recent innovations in conventional nuclear power such as fuel rods and a systematic rethinking of fast-breeder technology that eliminates much of the waste and weaponry problems, as well as the fact that Finland may be sitting on enough uranium to satisfy its current power needs for over a thousand years, there is clearly huge scientific and commercial interest locally, but about the only people willing to utter the U-word are freaked-out homeowners in Espoo who may be living on top of commercially viable uranium deposits. In any case, if calls for non-CO2-emitting energy grow and such ideas as Warren Buffet’s proposal for a universal registry and comprehensive tracking of nuclear fuel gain acceptance, big changes could lie ahead for one of the nastiest and most problematic of technologies.
Finland has always been famous for its engineers — from the mythological Ilmarinen, forever saving the national bacon (but unlucky with the ladies) to Eero Mäkinen, who single-handedly created a national metals industry and Martti Valtonen, who trained an entire generation of Nokia engineers to do the basic theoretical work in inaugurating the electromagnetic noosphere. So why don’t we hear much about Finnish engineers today? They’re probably back in their labs working on quantum dots, energy-neutral housing, cleaning up the Baltic cesspool, nanomedicine, a complete new theory of the universe, or whatever. Don’t worry, you’ll hear about it in a couple of decades, it’s just that right now there’s no time for self-promotion. That’s the way Finns are.
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