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"As many as 30 Greenpeace activists broke into a Swedish nuclear plant Monday, demanding that parliament this week vote against allowing new nuclear facilities to be built, the group and police said. "There are now Greenpeace activists on the premises" of the Forsmark nuclear power plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm, police spokesman Christer Nordstroem told AFP. He said it remained unclear how many Greenpeace activists had managed to get into the plant, but the environmental group itself sent out a statement earlier saying around 30 would enter the facility to conduct a peaceful protest against nuclear power use."

The 1000 Islands could be at risk when radioactive nuclear waste is shipped through the region in September, says Senator Bob Runciman. In an interview Friday, Runciman said radioactive metal from the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station will be transported on aging ships on a river that this year has very low water levels. The shipment could be especially dangerous in the narrow passages of the 1000 Islands region west of Brockville, he added. "My main concern is essentially that we have had two groundings (of ships) in the past two weeks, one in our area and one in the Quebec area, and the lake fleet is an aging fleet, with an average age of 40," the senator explained. "Both of the breakdowns in the last couple of weeks have been attributed to mechanical failure." He also said St. Lawrence River water levels remain low, which creates a greater danger when the 1,800 tonnes of nuclear material from radioactive steam generators is transported through the "

Swedish power group Vattenfall [VATN.UL] said on Tuesday an inspection had revealed one broken control rod and cracks in about 30 percent of others at its Forsmark 3 reactor. Forsmark communications director Claes-Inge Andersson told Reuters that about 100 out of 169 rods had been inspected and cracks had been found in some 25-30 percent of them.

The Swedish nuclear safety regulator said Friday it had received letters it requested from the country's nuclear power plant operators confirming their plants were safe to continue operating. "We have received the letter from the licensees and are currently evaluating their statements," a spokesman for the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority told Platts in an email. Cracks were recently discovered in the control rods at the 1,155 MW Oskarshamn-3 nuclear reactor while it was undergoing maintenance. The 1,170 MW Forsmark-3 reactor, of the same type of design as Oskarshamn-3, was then shut down for checks.

A decision by management of Sweden's Oskarshamn nuclear power plant to have custodial workers stand in as guards has drawn a sharp rebuke from the country's nuclear regulatory authority. For a week in early October, members of a contract cleaning crew stood guard along sections of the plant's perimeter fencing during repairs to the plant's alarm system.

When a reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986 in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine, radioactive elements were released in the air and dispersed over the Soviet Union, Europe and even eastern portions of North America.

The Swedish nuclear watchdog on Wednesday filed charges against the operators of a Swedish nuclear plant over failing to uphold security checks at the plant. The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority said the Oskarshamn nuclear plant operators had failed to ensure 24-hour checks of people entering and leaving the site. The security lapse was detected in connection with an inspection at the end of May, the nuclear watchdog said.

Oskarshamn nuclear plant has been found to lack sufficient safeguards to ensure that security checks are performed on everybody entering the plant

So far the Swedish government has kept pretty quiet about the state-owned energy company Vattenfall's plans to buy up British Energy, a nuclear power company. But now Industry Minister Maud Olofsson has brought Vattenfall's acquisition plans to a halt, splitting the governing Alliance parties in the process.

The three opposition parties have announced their intention to phase out Sweden's nuclear power capacity if they were to win the next election in 2010. The four leaders of the Social Democrats, Green party and Left party - Mona Sahlin, Maria Wetterstrand, Peter Eriksson and Lars Ohly - write in an opinion article in Dagens Nyheter on Sunday that nuclear power should be replaced by renewable energy sources. The shift to renewable energy sources should be undertaken with respect to the protection of "jobs and welfare".

Sweden's three opposition political parties plan on arriving at government energy talks on Thursday armed with a common position, the parties announced on Monday. We are in agreement that nuclear energy should be phased out and that we should generate surplus electricity through renewable sources," said Green Party spokesperson Peter Eriksson to the TT news agency. But the Social Democrats, the Left Party, and the Green Party have their doubts about the seriousness of the government's invitation to discuss energy policy.

Civic competition is a deep and ancient force. Ever since towns were towns, they have found ways to assert their superiority over one another, through commerce, war and other, more sporting encounters. The thrill of outdoing a neighbour, the fear of losing to the rivals from along the shore, are apparently universal human urges and the world crackles with all kinds of local contests, from the town lantern competitions of the Philippines to America's "Best Tennis Town" and the tidy villages of Ireland.

Swedish-based electricity group Vattenfall sacked the head of one of Germany's nuclear power stations on Tuesday, three days after a short circuit crippled the reactor he was in charge of. Although the fault did not involve the reactor itself, it has brought the controversial issue of nuclear power back into play just three months before the country's general election. The incident occured at the Kruemmel reactor east of Hamburg, one of Germany's 17 reactors. Vattenfall blamed the plant manager, whom it did not name, for failing to install discharge detectors on a transformer as promised to the German authorities. It added that the two electrical transformers supplying power to on-site machinery would not be repaired, but completely replaced after one of the units failed Saturday.

Berlin - Swedish electricity giant Vattenfall admitted Thursday to additional problems at one of its German nuclear power stations, which caught fire several days ago just after a two-year refit from a previous fire. Blunders at the Kruemmel power station have turned nuclear safety into an election issue in Germany. Though neither of the fires was in the reactor itself, Vattenfall said it had also discovered at least one of the 80,000 rods of uranium inside the reactor was "defective." The defect was not connected to the shutdown of the reactor during an electrical transformer fire on Saturday. Engineers are to take the lid off the idled reactor on Friday to search for the rods, Vattenfall said. Tuoma Hatakka, chief executive of Vattenfall Europe, the German subsidiary which runs several of the 12 nuclear power stations in Germany, insisted in Berlin, "My summary is simple: Kruemmel is safe."

"The politically-independent Nuclear Waste Council is not convinced of the safety of a planned storage scheme for Sweden's nuclear waste. TT reports that the committee questions the durability of the copper capsules set to hold the waste and the quality of the bentonite mud that is to surround the containers. The debate about what to do with Sweden's nuclear waste has especially divided residents of Östhammar, the place where the waste would be stored under the scheme. The leftover nuclear products would be kept in copper barrels surrounded by a layer of protective bentonite mud, all of it buried 500 meters inside a rock mountain. SKB, the Swedish company with plans to build the storage center, has told the Council that the waste would be safely stowed for 100,000 years."

"Sweden's prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has asked for explanations from a previous government on Russia's alleged release of toxic waste into Swedish waters in the Baltic sea over 15 years ago, a secret unearthed by Swedish public service televsion SVT. SVT reported on Wednesday that Russia dumped chemical weapons and radioactive waste off the shores of Gotland between 1991 and 1994. Reinfeldt's spokeswoman told the press that he "didn't know about the issue.""

Foreign Minister Carl Bildt denies that he had any knowledge of the radioactive waste and chemical weapons, that Swedish Television reports say could have been dumped in the Baltic Sea by the Russian military as late as the 1990s. According to Swedish Television's programme Uppdrag Granskning, the Swedish government at the time was aware of the dumping, but the Ministry of Defence decided it would be too difficult to investigate the matter. Swedish secret service agent Donald Forsberg holds that the Russians unloaded the chemicals near the island of Gotland between the years 1989 and 1992. "They just sailed out at night and dumped in two areas," he told the television programme."