If we have an accident there is no going back to coal for several decades, during which the population will calm down and start supporting nuclear power again.
This is what Olof Palme and the other Swedish politicians of the 70's thought, kind of "Field of dreams": build them and they can't go away.
And it worked! Despite TMI, Chernobyl and our anti-nuclear referendum more than 80 % of all Swedes yet again support nuclear power. :D Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
It was partly an environmental decision, to improve air quality and save the remaining rivers from exploitation, partly an answer to the oil shocks and partly a way to guarantee cheap power to Swedish industry, which is probably the most electricity intensive in the world (steel and especially pulp require vast amounts of power).
The Swedish nuclear power program coexisted with the Swedish nuclear weapons program (of which Palme had been a strong supporter) but it was separated during the 60's when the Americans told us to stop playing with nuclear arms and guaranteed us enriched uranium (which is needed for light water reactors).
Earlier our program was based on heavy water reactors and domestic uranium but it was never much of a success. We built a really small combined heat and power reactor in a Stockholm suburb (which was probably meant to be used for manufacture of military plutonium) and then we fucked up a 400 MW heavy water reactor project. Just as the reactor was supposed to go online (after delays, cost over-runs etc) the engineers understood the reactor wasn't safe enough. Oops. Just a few years before the oil crisis, it was ironically converted to an oil plant, making the whole project even more of a farce.
Private industry woke the state from it's natural uranium dreams (called "The Swedish line") by ordering a light water reactor in front of the state's nose, and since then it's been light water reactors all the way.
We ordered three Westinghouse PWR's and nine domestic ASEA BWR's which will serve us into the mid 2040's.
Two of the smallest BWR's where recently closed due to pressure from the evil Greens but no more shutdowns are seen as even remotely realistic. Instead the nuclear industry is uprating the remaining ten reactors so forcefully (with the silent approval of the government (and the Greens)) that the new generation-capacity is greater than the capacity of the two closed reactors.
The closing of the two BWR's has cost the Swedish people more than €2 billion. Every time I see a Green I remind her of how many wind mills, trains and trams you can get for €2 billion. ;) Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
