Sweden's Unit 1 at the Oskarhamn nuclear power plant will be closed in June 2017, the plant's operator OKG AB said, choosing a closure date that is on the early side of the parameters of last year's announcement. In October 2015, OKG said that the plant would close between 2017 and 2019 due a negative market environment.
Even earlier, in July 2015, the company said that Unit 1 would close within that time frame and that Unit 2 would be permanently closed by 2020. In October, they announced that there would be no further investments in Unit 2 and that it would not be restarted following its final scheduled fall outage.
Unit 3 at the plant, the company said, would continue to operate within its “technical lifetime,” which could see it operating through 2045.
OKG minority owner Fortum, at first, protested the decision that was made by majority owner Eon, the German utility. But economic conditions remain daunting, the company said.
The company is faced with a Swedish tax on nuclear power plants that survived a review by the European Commission, which said the tax was permissible and a concern for the state, but not the European Union. In addition, low wholesale prices for electricity and the expense of continued maintenance affected the decision, the company said.
The decision to close the two units came shortly after the European Commission made its ruling on the tax issue.
The plant with three units running was able to produce 10 percent of the electricity generated in Sweden.
The previous time line for the Unit 1 shut down had allowed for a possible refueling in June. The company said, however, that the scheduled June shutdown would be permanent.
The company also said that “an exact schedule for the length of time it will take before the facilities can be demolished and the restoration of land can commence is currently not available.”
Thirteen years separate the startups for the three Oskarshamn reactors. Unit 1 is a 473 MWe boiling water reactor (BWR) that was started up in 1972. Unit 2 is a 638 MWe BWR that started commercial operations in 1974. Eleven years after that, the larger Oskarshamn Unit 3 was fired up. That is a 1400 MWe BWR that began operating in 1985.