Today it is 30 years since the accident at Three Mile Island in the US with a meltdown as the result. Not only did the core suffer a meltdown but the building of further nuclear power plants in the US was hampered and not only there, in many countries all over the world – including Sweden – there was serious discussion on if nuclear power should be allowed at all.

Wednesday, March 28, 1979 is the date that will go to history as one of the darkest days in the history of nuclear power. After this disaster the building of new uclear plants in the the US was completely stopped. Not until now, 30 years later are actually new plants being planned for. In total 26 new nuclear power plants all over the country. China are planning to increase the number of reactors from eleven to 32 in the coming years.

And actually the disaster is a testament to the great security that was employed in building the Three Mile Island reactor. The public was never in any real danger despite the disaster, the enclosement of the core was working exactly as planned and the release of nuclear particles into the atmosphere was actually lower than one year of normal operation for a plant like this.

People who knows me knows that I prefer nuclear power to fossil-fuel power plants and I would rather see several new reactors built rather than new coal plants in Germany and Poland. Not to mention the emerging economies in Asia.

The truth is that many more people dies from pollution each year than from ionizing radiation and when the Chernobyl disaster struck it was Swedish nuclear power plants who first noticed an increase in the background radiation level.

Technology can always be better and there are still some old dodgy reactors around in Russia. Let’s help them build new modern reactors that are safe to use and build on the rather safe technology that we have used in Sweden, where the reactor never can go critical, if something goes wrong it will just shut down.