ASAHI SHIMBUN
On a recent sunny day in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, the blades of about a dozen wind turbines along the shore were rotating fast under a clear blue sky.
In the distance, across the Baltic Sea, the black silhouette of a building was visible.
It was the Barseback Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden.
According to the Swedish government’s policy of phasing out the country’s nuclear power generation, the No. 1 reactor at the plant was shut down in 1999 and the No. 2 reactor ceased operations in 2005.
The nuclear fuel has been moved out of the plant, and the work to scrap the reactors is now under way.
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While the Danish economy has been growing steadily since the 1980s, the country’s energy consumption has remained almost flat. The Swedish economy expanded by about 50 percent during the 17 years from 1990, but the country’s emissions of greenhouse gases fell by 9 percent during the period.
In contrast, Japan’s economy grew by slightly less than 30 percent during the same period, while its greenhouse gas emissions increased by as much as 9 percent.
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