About Fortum

“We want to be driving the transformation towards a cleaner world.“

“Nuclear energy has a key role to play in producing clean power. As a reliable, zero-CO2 energy source, it is helping to cover current electricity demand, improve security of supply, and curb the impact of climate change. Viewed across its entire lifecycle, nuclear power has a carbon footprint as small as that of wind, water, and solar.”

Fortum

In the centre of the southeastern Finnish town of Imatra can be found the Imatran Voima power plant, which draws its energy from the Vuoksi River. Put into operation back in 1929, it now supplies over 50,000 homes with electricity. A company named Imatran Voima had been set up to run the hydroelectric power station in 1932. Having focused initially on building more hydropower plants and expanding Finland’s power grid, the state-owned concern brought what was then Northern Europe’s largest coal-fired power station on stream in the 1960s. Imatran Voima built power lines between the Soviet Union and Finland and between Finland and Sweden and was involved in the electrification of Finland’s railways. The company also began operating nuclear power plants from a very early stage, specifically in the 1970s. After 1990, Imatran Voima started to expand its plant design and operation activities in Finland as well as in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Another state-run company, Neste Oyj, emerged out of Finland’s national oil reserve in Naantali in 1947. The newly founded company’s tasks included importing, storing, processing, and trading in oil products as a way of making Finland’s fuel supply less dependent on other countries. Neste opened the first oil refinery of its own in Naantali in 1958 before building a second not far from Porvoo in 1972. Neste became the main player in the Finnish petrochemicals industry in the 1970s. In the years that followed, it reduced its dependence on Soviet crude oil and secured new sources for imports from the Persian Gulf. As well as entering Finland’s filling station market, Neste also began expanding into fuel supply in Eastern Europe after 1990.

In 1998, the Finnish government merged the two businesses under the name “Fortum” and privatised the new company via the Finnish stock exchange, although the Republic of Finland remains the majority shareholder. Fortum became more familiar in German-speaking countries in 2017, when it acquired nearly 48 per cent of the German utility Uniper. The German government bought back all the shares in September 2022. Uniper was nationalised, in other words, because its financial situation had deteriorated rapidly and significantly as a result of the European gas crisis, meaning that supplies to many German households could no longer be guaranteed.

Final storage 450 metres underground

In November 2015, the Finnish government granted its approval for the operator Posiva, in which Fortum holds a significant stake, to build a repository 400 to 450 metres underground. This final storage facility would have capacity for 6,500 tonnes of nuclear waste encapsulated in copper canisters. To guard against the possibility of moisture getting in, the operator has promised to seal the storage areas with bentonite, a highly absorbent swelling rock composed of several clay materials.

Posiva submitted its application for an operating licence for the encapsulation facility and the repository to the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment on 30 December 2021. The permit is intended to be valid for 100 years and is based on the planned lifetime of the four nuclear power stations in Olkiluoto and Loviisa and the time still required after this to cool the fuel (radioactive decay) before putting it into final storage. A further extension for the third Olkiluoto power plant, which is currently under construction, will need to be applied for separately. The repository is to be sealed permanently after the operating licence has expired.

At a time when much of Europe is turning its back on nuclear power, it is being welcomed in Finland.

The fact is that Finland is a good place for nuclear power. The country has a relatively low population, so not many nuclear reactors are required for supply purposes and thus the risks to which the country is exposed are lower too. Experts say that the success of Finland’s nuclear power plants also reflects the country’s unique cultural and political landscape: a high level of trust in institutions, community engagement, the fact that power is not centralised at government level, and a balance of power between industry and interest groups.

Finland has large rural areas, an extensive coastline, and, in Olkiluoto, an excellent place to base both reactors and the world’s first-ever permanent nuclear repository. Situated off the coast of the village of Eurajoki, the tiny island of Olkiluoto has just enough people nearby to keep everything running smoothly. The nuclear waste repository is located inside this impervious rock and was deliberately placed in the middle, as far away as possible from two nearby earthquake faults (this is also one of the reasons why the nuclear power plants were built in Olkiluoto in the first place).

When the waste arrives on-site, it is first put inside a cast-iron container. A layer of inert argon gas is then added before everything is sealed inside a copper canister, which is welded shut. The only real concern is corrosion caused by oxygen – in this case oxygen that might hypothetically be dissolved inside the water itself. Fortum’s experts argue that the dissolved oxygen would already have been consumed by bacteria and other media before the water could even get inside the sealed canisters containing the nuclear waste.

The final storage of the nuclear waste in particular creates problems to solve due to the extremely long time it needs to be stored for. For instance, how do you warn people about the risks 100,000 years down the line? Linguists and semiotics experts have been attempting to find solutions to this problem for many years now, so far without success.

In 2004, work was being done on a repository for highly radioactive waste that was intended for spent fuel from the reactors in Olkiluoto and the Loviisa nuclear power plant. Efforts to expand this part of the repository, called onkalo (cavity, cave, shelter) in Finnish, are also the subject of the documentary Into Eternity, which is well worth watching.

The issue of safety

As part of our latest engagement activities, one of the questions that we asked the company was about the safety of nuclear power plants and repositories in the face of natural disasters and under pressure from the ongoing war in Europe.

Fortum gave us this answer, about which readers can make up their own minds: “Nuclear safety in the Nordic countries is amongst the best in the world. We do not experience earthquakes or other natural disasters, and war is unlikely (despite the highly improbable occurrence that is the war in Ukraine). We regard the risk of war as very low.”

Herbert Perus
Fund Management – Corporate Responsibility at Raiffeisen KAG