What's going on in Denmark?

Could you introduce yourself? What is your background and what brought you to nuclear energy?

JCS: My background is in political science. So I graduated from the Danish University in the city of Aarhus with a bachelor's in political science. From there I got inspired to look into nuclear as part of my studies as a political science student. At that time we looked a lot into larger climate reports from IPCC and also compared different countries' history of implementing different green energy sources.

By chance, I stumbled upon another student that started thinking the same thoughts as me and we started talking a little bit about this kind of, at that moment, stigmatized area of nuclear energy. We started a volunteer-based association in Denmark, called Foreningen Atomkraft Ja Tak  (the atomic power association, yes please) to try to combat this narrative of nuclear energy being dangerous and not being a viable path for a country like Denmark and other countries. With my background in political science, I started studying nuclear energy five years ago on a volunteer base and started the organization.

This was during COVID, so there was a lot of time to dig deep and use hundreds, if not thousands of hours to read through every piece of literature that I could get my hands on. Very fast actually, we made an organization here in Denmark, with me as a founder and a chairperson that started influencing the public debate in Denmark. 

This led to my partner in crime, Theis Palm, which I started the organization with, he started the Danish department of Kärnfull Energi, which is a Swedish-based company that also now has a Danish department and also a sister company that actually develops nuclear power projects, mostly focused on the Nordic countries. Quite soon after he started the company I joined him, started helping him and for the last two to three years I've been working full-time with communications and analytics surrounding nuclear energy mostly in Denmark and in Sweden and surrounding countries.

We are the first company in the world that sells 100% nuclear energy, based on guarantees of origin, to residential and business customers. Similar to what Constellation has just announced in the US. But we were actually the first company in the world that through guarantees of origin could certify people's electricity calling it 100% nuclear energy based. 

How does that work?

JCS: It's possible because we buy it from Swedish nuclear power plants. Of course, people don't literally get plugged into a Swedish power plant, so they’re not getting 100% nuclear electricity from their outlet. It's only a certificate, guarantees of origin after usage. So every year we buy the same amount of consumption that our customers consumer at Swedish nuclear power plants and we have actually created quite a big consumer movement of Danish consumers that have chosen to change their residential electricity deal. But we also have some large companies that we supply electricity to.

I suppose that your background in political sciences helps with building that movement?

JCS: It has helped a lot. Both Theis and I have a background in political science. I think what we bring to the table is what nuclear energy has missed for decades. We always had professionals in engineering or physics, chemistry, mostly in STEM based people dominating the public discourse. What nuclear energy has missed is people with political communication skills. People that not only truly understand nuclear energy, but also know how to utilize this energy source in a conversation. Emphasizing the positive attributes of this energy source instead of always being on the defensive regarding it supposedly being dangerous, the waste and so on. It's about changing the narrative to talk about how nuclear energy can enable a lot of things.

That has not been present in the Danish nuclear energy debate for decades and is something we brought to the table. We brought the experience and the knowledge of political communication into a very hardcore science field where only a few people know what’s actually going on.

The association you chair uses a variation of the well known anti-nuclear logo, could you tell us more about that?

JCS: At that time, as of course, Denmark had a very stark history of anti-nuclearism. The logo of the anti-nuclear movement was made by a Dane. It's actually made in the city that I live in right now. I'm actually walking past it in five minutes. So it's quite ironic. I actually also lived right beside it 200 meters when I started the organization.

The logo of our association has the opposite message and was designed by a Swedish designer. We adopted his design as our logo and besides the message “nuclear power? yes please” it features a smiling atomic model. We explicitly said “nuclear energy” to make a statement. We could’ve said “clean energy”, as we’re not against solar and wind in our organisation. But it wouldn't get any coverage. People would not get any cues or associations when seeing our logo, if it was called something like, save the planet, yes, please, or anything like that. That's why we call it nuclear power. Yes, please. And that made a lot of headlines, I can assure you in Denmark.

Because we took this seriously, we transformed in public opinion from boys and girls from the university that wanted to pull a stunt to save the Earth, to a group with a professional stance and serious opinions on climate change. That made a lot of politicians and companies take us seriously, which has paved the way for us to have a lot of influence on the agenda about nuclear energy.

Denmark has been on the forefront of the energy transition over the past 30 years or so, inspiring many and often being pointed to as a great example. Let's start with the positives: what did Denmark achieve so far?

JCS: That's a good question. I would say like one of the things that Denmark did so far was actually contributing to actually taking climate change seriously in public opinion.

So the fact that we actually put climate change on the agenda, that's a big achievement for Denmark. But I have no big words to say about the implementation of regulations or energy sources that are aimed at mitigating climate change, because if you look at the pollution, the CO₂ emissions from Danish domestic usage, you will see that our emissions have stagnated over the years.

You would think that we have gotten a decrease as we are the first country in the world that had a very ambitious climate target of reducing our CO₂ emissions by 70% in 2030 compared to 1990. If you look at the official statements from the Danish government, you'll see that we're heading there and are currently at the halfway point, 35%. This would be quite a challenge.

And that's only looking at a tiny part of the picture because we did something in Denmark at the end of the 20th century that was quite a remarkable move. If you wanted to reduce your CO₂ emissions on paper, we started changing from burning a lot of coal to burning biomass in our energy system. We started converting our coal power plants to biomass burning power plants and combined heat and power plants. At that time, because of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, we were able to actually get away with changing our energy sector from coal-based to biomass-based and reducing our emissions from coal, which has over a thousand grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour to, supposedly, zero.

In our legislation, our official climate CO₂ emissions, all of the CO₂ that is emitted from our biomass burning in Denmark is put at zero grams of CO₂. That's what we started in the nineties and we kept on doing it. We phased out all of our coal by now. We don't have that much coal in the Danish electricity system around 10 percent and we don't have that much biomass either yet we have maybe 15 to 20 percent for electricity.

But all of our district heating in Denmark, like 95% of it, is from biomass. That district heating covers 20% of all energy usage in Denmark, because around 70% of all households in Denmark are connected to the district heating network. So what we actually have done in Denmark is that we phased out coal, we implemented biomass instead, and then we started building offshore and onshore wind and solar plants but to this day only 10 to 12 percent of all Danish energy consumption is covered by green energy sources such as wind and solar. The last 90 percent of energy consumption, not electricity but energy, is still covered by burning stuff. So oil, gas, coal and biomass.

We always present ourselves as being very green with headlines claiming that 60% of our electricity is covered by wind and solar, and while that is correct, it’s also just a fifth of the real story. The last 80 % of energy consumed in Denmark is still from oil, gas, biomass and coal.

If you compare us to countries like Finland and Sweden, Norway and France, they have electrified a bit further than we have because they have also electrified their heating sector in some senses. Our electrification in Denmark has stagnated as well since the 1990s. If you go back to 1995, if you look at how much electrification we had, it was also 20%.

Many people would say that biomass isn't bad because you grow woods or plants or whatever the stuff might be that you're going to burn, and there’s a cycle going on with carbon being pulled out of the atmosphere first.

JCS: Yeah, that's just bullshit. There’ll always be stray or leftovers from agricultural use. I think it's okay to burn that and convert it to electricity or heat instead of just dumping it in a big hole or burning it just to get rid of it. That's not the problem. In Denmark that only covers around 5% of our biomass usage. The real issue is the industrialised conveyor belt-like biomass consumption in the form of imported wood pellets. These wood pellets come from other places in the world that cause local deforestation because of our need for these pellets.

So, 95% of the biomass in Denmark comes from wood pellets from places like North America?

JCS: No. The 95% figure is about the woody biomass. We have to distinguish between different things. You can have biomass from a lot of things. Some of it can be waste, some of it can come from agriculture, some of it can be biogas, and some of it can be hard woody biomass. So the waste is around 5% of the total consumption. And the last 95% consists of biogas from agriculture, like cow shit, to be frank.

There's also leftovers from the wood industry and so on. But the biggest part of the whole consumption is wood pellets, which is over 50% of our total consumption of biomass. I think it might be around 60%, perhaps 65%. Most of those wood pellets are imported and that's why I call it bullshit. It’s as if you’re supporting a dictator because of a decision he makes, but 95% you disagree with and makes him a terrible person, but you’re still calling him good because of that 5%. That’s the situation with biomass right now in Denmark.

In fact, it's a kind of climate colonialism we do in Denmark: We go to another country, we cut down their trees, we import them to Denmark, we burn them in Denmark and we don't get the CO₂ accounting on our books. The accounting is actually on the books of the country that we cut down the tree from.

I was going to ask how scalable this model would be for other countries, but this doesn't really sound scalable at all.

JCS: No, because if you look at the latest peer-reviewed studies on land application of energy sources, there's quite a good paper called Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape by Lovering et al in 2021 that looks at the satellite and GPS data of different energy sources. Doing that we see data from real life examples from the world and use that to see how much biomass that we actually use in Denmark. We're talking like immense amounts of land that you need to use to cover our energy use in Denmark right now for biomass. I think that nearly half of the whole total land area of Denmark should be one big forest just to cover our consumption right now in Denmark. It's bonkers. You cannot scale this. Remember Denmark has only six million inhabitants.

And that's because of the energy density of wood. Using it as reducing energy for millions of people is a shitty idea. It was not meant to be like this. It was supposed to be a transition fuel towards more energy-dense fuels, but somebody in the 1990s thought, maybe let's go back to burning wood again. Let's turn back the clock.

What about importing energy? That is, if we ignore the biomass for now. Is Denmark self-sufficient in electricity?

JCS: Denmark is maybe the country in the world that has the greatest dependence on importing electricity from other countries. We have interconnectors in Denmark that could actually cover 120% of our total electric consumption. We could theoretically just stop producing and just importing from other places.

That’s why Denmark is also used as an electricity highway from Norway to Germany and the rest of Europe. A lot of the electricity that we import in Denmark doesn't get consumed in Denmark, it just flows on to Germany and other places. If you look at the self-sufficiency rate or level, in Denmark we have the lowest self-sufficiency level among all the Northern European countries.

Lately we have seen the Danish TSO (transmission system operator), just release a report called the summary of electricity security in Denmark. They found that in the most critical hour in the 2030s, maybe in 2034, Denmark could only cover around 25 to 40% of our consumption from energy sources domestically.

Countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Britain, and so on, have self-sufficiency levels of 85% and up to over 100% because the domestic reproduction is inland and they're not dependent on other countries at the same rate. This is from the ENTSO-E, they make a report called the ERAA report every year. That is a report where they gather all of the European countries’ plans of building their energy systems, and they look how the different countries can contribute to each other because we are interconnected. They make a whole big energy system model and that's how this is being calculated.

It's a huge model that tries to calculate difficult scenarios in a decade 10 years, where we don't have wind in any of the northern European countries, as in a big dunkelflaute lasting days, how that would look like. As with the stated policies, the policies that we have right now, we will have a lot of blackouts and brownouts in the 2030s. That's not me saying that, it's the TSO of Denmark making this analysis. So we are pretty fucked as things stand right now.

Another thing that has been introduced to this whole conversation lately is geopolitics: the threat of a war between Russia and the US and of course Chinese and Russian ships cutting or sailing over interconnecting lines on seafloors, and who could forget the North Stream sabotage. So we are seeing a further and higher security alert around critical infrastructure at sea. This is where Denmark is the most dependent.

At this moment we are self-sufficient because we still have a lot of thermal power plants that are able to burn coal and gas. But the plan for these power plants is to be phased out in the next couple of years and I don't think it's going to happen. I've said this for several years and people were like “no, no, of course, we'll just build a lot of wind and solar”. Right now, at this security threat and also the pace of the implementation of renewable energy sources, not being able to replace thermal sources we will see us, Denmark will keep on burning biomass and coal and gas for several more years, if not indefinitely.

Which is perhaps a nice way to transition back to the topic of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has been banned since before Chornobyl, could you tell us how that happened?

JCS: Okay, so back in the 1970s, we had a growing environmental movement in Denmark that started to integrate the ideas of the anti-nuclear movement of the US. We saw environmental groups starting to campaign against nuclear power and nuclear bombs and making this connection as we saw in the US in the 70s. This sprung into a very large movement in Denmark as Danish politicians made plans for building nuclear power plants in Denmark. And our at that time state-owned TSO actually wanted to find locations for them. 

Then Sweden opened the Barsebäck nuclear power plant on the shore directly opposite Copenhagen. At that point it became a very visible foe to point at. It was a god sent for the anti-nuclear movement. It became a part of our national identity to be against nuclear energy. There was a big movement, singing songs, going to meetings, being in the streets… It became its own social gravity where you just wanted to be part of the movement, whether or not you were against nuclear energy. The majority of the people marching against nuclear energy had no clue what it was about. They were just there because their friends were.

This culminated in a parliamentary decision in 1985 saying that the Danish energy system planning cannot include nuclear energy. It was not a particular ban against nuclear energy because it was only a parliamentary decision. So it was just the parliament that sat down together and said, we will not talk about nuclear energy. It was not a law. You can overthrow this decision anytime.

In 1997 this changed, the Danish ministry of environment at the time actually got a ban implemented, saying you can’t produce any electricity from nuclear energy. So you could build a reactor, but you could no longer build a generator attached to it. 

You could build a test reactor. We had test reactors in Denmark until 2001. We had three test reactors and one of the biggest pioneers of modern physics and nuclear energy, Niels Bohr, actually opened his own test facility in Denmark and made some big contributions to modern nuclear energy. But he died too soon in 1962 and with him died the dream of nuclear energy in Denmark at that time died with him. 

But now nuclear energy is on the table again, despite decades of renewable-only policies? Why?

JCS: It's changing because we are slowly and steadily admitting to us being not that good at implementing green energy sources. Denmark has lived for 30 years in this dream of us being the green leader in the world. We are still having big problems in Denmark as told before with the reduction of fossil fuels and biomass. This is slowly but steadily being realised by the Danish population.

Also because of the war in Ukraine and resulting energy crisis in Europe, it really gets people to understand just how vulnerable we actually are if we lose the ability to produce energy domestically. To combat climate change and provide secure and affordable energy we need all energy sources in the toolbox. We cannot discriminate against one just because our parents told us it was dangerous. It is naive and it's harmful in any way, shape and form.

Because the topic has been taboo for so long, the anti-nuclear movement doesn’t actually have any factual arguments. No one needed to have any real arguments for so long, so it’s not that surprising it got back on the political agenda in the way it did. Once back in the public discourse, anyone could contribute to the debate. Not just STEM people and politicians, but everyone in society, every class, and social status could participate in it. No one group had ownership over it anymore. Things started to move very fast all of a sudden.

On twitter you posted a thread detailing how you think the ban is going to be lifted this year, could you go into detail about that?

I would say there are different factors why I wrote that thread and I still stand by it. It’s mainly because we have a local election coming up in 2025 and we also have a government that is losing support, slowly but steadily. This is coming together with the rise of anti-bureaucracy, anti-governmentalism that is happening across Europe, whether you like it or not. I'm not supporting one side or the other, I'm just stating the fact that a lot of things are happening right now and the status quo is changing rapidly.

A part of the status quo was being against nuclear energy politically in Denmark. We're seeing in the latest opinion polls that the public is changing its mind. More and more people are supportive of nuclear energy in Denmark. We have more than an absolute majority of the Danish population, so over 50% supporting it and only 27% are against it. All of the parties that are on the right of the Danish parliament are pro-nuclear and they could together gather a majority if there was an election tomorrow. Even the Social-Democrats, the largest party left that needs to change, has a lot of internal talks about the subject.

All these factors combined, I see 2025 as the most probable year where the ban on nuclear energy will be lifted and we will open up to actually research the possibility of nuclear energy in Denmark.

Then you have the very left leaning parties in Denmark, they will never change. We just have to give up on them at this point. We only need the Social-Democrats. If you look at the Social-Democrats in Norway, we're seeing them being more open. If we're looking at the Social-Democrats in Sweden, they went from being against it to now being pro-nuclear. If you look at the Social-Democrats in Germany, they’re not in government anymore.

The countries where Social-Democrats are still big, or were big, they turned pro-nuclear, the others diminished. It's just saying that the archetype anti-nuclear parties in Europe either change their opinion right now or they lose votes and Denmark is the next in line. If the Danish Social-Democrats change their opinion, this ban will be lifted. Because I know so many politicians that are sitting on the edge of their chair to go into parliament and actually make this decision. I am 100% sure about 2025 being the year we see this change. I'm looking forward to it.

People have perhaps heard about Copenhagen Atomics or Seaborg Technologies. I know you aren't affiliated to them, but what is your opinion on their technology and business case?

JCS: Both companies are working on fourth-gen nuclear energy technologies with different fuel cycles. Copenhagen Atomics uses thorium and Seaborg Technologies uranium. The problem with these two companies is that they just want to build nuclear energy, fourth-gen nuclear energy to solve energy poverty in developing countries, mostly in eastern Asia. Their technology is not as of now interesting for the Danish government to look into, because this is not technology that has been deployed yet, not technology that has been tested, that is not being commercialised. Don’t get me wrong, I love both companies and the people working there, but it's not a realistic way for Denmark to bet on these companies to build in Denmark. 

The obvious way forward for Denmark would be to build light water SMR reactors. The countries that has to implement fourth gen technologies will need to be countries that already have experience with nuclear. So we cannot just jump over the whole fence and be like, this technology has never been tested before, let's do it in Denmark. We can make test facilities, and we should do that because we have a lot of professional people.

But it would maybe fit a little bit better to do the implementation of it in an existing commercialised system, like in Sweden, where we have Blykalla who are developing a lead-cooled fast reactor SMR. But if you look at molten salt technology, I think Copenhagen Atomics and Seaborg are the most promising two companies in the world.

Last but not least, is there anything you want to plug and should people want to follow your work, where can they find you?

JCS: Thank you very much for the interview. People can find me on LinkedIn and also on X.

There I post about energy, mostly concerning nuclear, but also being a little more skeptical about deployment of renewable energy sources and looking into other people's work and trying to be critical, trying to look at data critically and come up with my view and analysis of the current situation with the green transition. I publish there weekly. So it would be great to get people to look at that.

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