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UK’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Managemen (CoRWM) visit to Sweden’s radioactive waste facilities

Members of CoRWM recently visited the Forsmark and Clab sites in Sweden.From:Committee on Radioactive Waste Management

5 October 2026

 CoRWM members had been hoping to visit Sweden’s radioactive waste
facilities for some time, and our visit in September was well worth the
wait. Sweden is frequently discussed internationally as one of the
countries that has made significant progress towards the geological
disposal of both spent nuclear fuel, and low and intermediate level
operational wastes.

We wanted to understand more about how that progress
had been achieved, and particularly what we might learn from Sweden’s
experience of siting and public engagement. Our visit began at the Forsmark
nuclear site, in the municipality of Östhammar, where the repository for
short-lived radioactive wastes, SFR, has been operational since 1988. In
2009 the Forsmark site was also selected to house Sweden’s deep
geological spent fuel repository.

Construction has been underway since
2025. Our SKB hosts gave us an illustrated account of the history of the
Swedish siting process, drawing attention to what had gone well, as well as
the mistakes made in the early years. We were told that by the late 1980s
it had been established that there was suitable rock everywhere, but the
industry had yet to learn that however suitable the geology, “you can’t
just turn up with a digger”.

The SKB response to initial angry protests
was to embark on a major project of public engagement that began with the
posing of a basic question at a national level. They simply asked whether
people would be interested to find out how a repository for spent nuclear
fuel could affect their municipality? Eight municipalities from across the
country expressed an interest. What followed was much more than a search
for a willing community or a suitable geology. SKB invested heavily in
producing detailed socio-economic surveys of each of the candidate
municipalities, to see if they could identify mutual interests between
industry and residents.

 CoRWM 5th Oct 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/corwm-visit-to-swedens-radioactive-waste-facilities

October 10, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Sweden, wastes