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Support for nuclear power decommissioning has risen, somewhat surprisingly, in 2020. But if you place the SOM Institute figures above the actual policy alternatives in current politics, they become even more interesting. There seems to be a real headwind on the nuclear energy issue for the right-wing government alternative.
The government clings in the 2016 energy agreement which states that nuclear reactors can operate for as long as the owners want and that they can also be replaced by new reactors in the future. According to the SOM Institute survey, such a line – “Use nuclear energy and replace current reactors with as many new ones as there are today” – has the support of 19 percent of the electorate. If we add them together with the 10 percent who want to quickly dismantle and the 39 percent who only want to use the current reactors, two-thirds of the electorate are gathered.
While the answer option most similar to the one recently defended by the four right-wing parties – “Use nuclear energy and build more reactors than the current ones in the future” – only gathers 12 percent.
Here you can stop and make some objections.
First of all, the debate is not just about the rules and laws that apply, that is, that nuclear power can continue to produce electricity, that owners can build new reactors and that there is a green light for nuclear energy research. in the future.
The debate is also about what political goal the parties have set for future electricity production and where the government wants it to be renewable while the opposition wants to affirm a future with nuclear energy by changing to the word “fossil-free.”
A part of voters who primarily support the policy pursued might at the same time think that it should be reformulated and then the figures will likely be somewhat different.
The second objection concerns this winter’s debate. Could it be that the brief but intense nuclear debate that was taking place when the winter cold hit has already changed public opinion and made it more nuclear-powered?
Here we can only make an assessment. Probably some bourgeois voters have been affected by the winter debate, it is mainly the male bourgeois voters who have wavered in recent years and some of them may now have returned to adopt a more positive attitude from the nuclear point of view. Voters tend to be receptive to messages from their parties.
But it is not very likely that the opinion of the voters as a whole has changed so much that we get a completely opposite picture of the opinion on nuclear energy in next year’s poll.
It is one which is why the issue of nuclear power will not be particularly important in choosing between different government alternatives, although it may play a role for individual parties, as it did for the Christian Democrats in the 2018 elections. Voters are subordinate to other political issues.
Many will probably be surprised that the majority of Liberal voters want to phase out nuclear power: 51 percent versus 42 percent who want to continue nuclear power. Despite decades of advocating for more nuclear power, the party has not gained fewer and fewer supporters of its own to the party line.
Another result that may surprise those who have listened to the debate is that voters who are most positive about nuclear power are at the same time less negative about fossil fuels. The old rule that critics of nuclear power are more positive about the sun and the wind than its advocates still applies.
The question then is How will a new government change its nuclear policy if M / KD / SD and L win the next election?
The simplest things first. A government led by Kristersson will proclaim a new goal for electricity production and say that policy from now on is for fossil-free electricity. It is a free measure that the four of them already agree on.
They can also easily agree on the direction of research funding for nuclear research. It is possible to request money for such an investigation today, but a new government will want to allocate money: the moderates propose 250 million a year.
Then it gets a little more difficult. Swedish Democrats and Christian Democrats often sound as if a new government should take concrete initiatives to build new nuclear power reactors. While the moderate line is more restrained. Research is likely to be carried out on less expensive measures, for example how electricity prices could benefit nuclear power. But don’t expect either party to go to the polls on proposals for higher electricity prices.
Up to that point The nuclear debate continues now that the spring heat takes over, it will apply to the storage of radioactive waste. The opposition believes that the government is slow to approve a final arrest. And he does not claim without justification that the reason for the government’s slowness is the Green Party’s reluctance to the underlying proposal.
But focusing on the waste issue is not without its problems for those parties that want to see a future with more nuclear power. The debate over how to ensure hundreds of thousands of years of storage for highly active substances also sheds light on the ethical dilemma that was the main reason nuclear power once emerged as the longest-running conflict in politics.
