Telegraph | News | Finns give nuclear plant a positive reaction

Eurajoki has much to offer its visitors: an attractive coastline, an elegant manor house and a medieval castle. But in its tourism brochures the town in western Finland prefers to boast most of all about its electricity.

"Welcome to the most electric municipality in Finland", a typical greeting reads.

The town's biggest tourist attractions are the two colossal nuclear power plants of Russian design that dominate the nearby island of Olkiluoto in the Baltic and meet a fifth of Finland's electricity needs.

A third super reactor, Olkiluoto 3, is being fashioned out of the same Nordic red clay, gneiss and granite. Huge lifting cranes hover above a field of iron braces fastened into concrete foundations, as 500 workers scuttle around the 50-acre construction site in thick snow and temperatures that are below freezing.

It will be the first nuclear-power plant constructed in Europe for more than a decade and, at 1,600 megawatts, the French-designed reactor, which is due to go online in 2009, will also be the world's most powerful.

Finland's decision to pursue a nuclear future contrasts with the policy of several European countries to close plants down. Britain, however, is considering re-investing in nuclear fuel.

At a time when energy has shot to the top of the agenda and in a year during which Russia has alarmed many European countries by turning off Ukraine's gas supply during a pay dispute, Olkiluoto's supporters are convinced that "OK3" marks a turning point for the nuclear industry.

Finland is leading the way. Across Europe a spate of new nuclear plant projects and proposals have emerged. Increasingly governments are deciding that alternatives to nuclear power are either too expensive, too unstable or too polluting.

"What else should we do?" asked Martin Landtmann, the project manager of TVO, the electricity conglomerate that operates the reactors. "We don't want to extract more coal, we don't want to import more gas from Russia, wind power is unreliable and we need cheap energy to be able to compete.

"So Finland has gone for the nuclear solution and as a result everyone is looking at Finland. All countries face more or less the same challenge - where they should get their energy from."

Mr Landtmann responded to arguments that Finland was ignoring alternative energy sources by saying that 6,000 wind turbines would be needed along a 1,400-mile coastline to produce the same amount of power as OK3.

The reactor's French-German manufacturers, Framatome ANP, have offered to build the reactor for the fixed price of £2 billion.

As well as looking sturdily Scandinavian in design from the outside, the reactor is furnished with sauna cubicles for its workers. In another energy-efficient move, the warm outlet water is circulated through a garden where water melons and Lithuanian grapes are grown and from which Olkiluoto wine is produced.

Eurajoki will also be home to a radioactive waste-storage site: a 1,640ft-deep tunnel, a fifth of which has already been dug.

It would be normal to expect a community to be alarmed at such a prospect. But what is remarkable is the enthusiasm of most of the public.

There was very little protest locally or across the country, bar a few young couples who went on a "baby-strike", refusing to get pregnant until the plans were stopped. But they backed down once it was narrowly passed in parliament.

Pirjo Jaakola, Eurajoki's cultural commissioner and a mother of five children, explained the locals' acquiescence. "Everyone knows someone who works there and nothing has ever gone wrong there so we have no reason to fear it."
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