The “Swedish line” was an ambitious program in the 1950s-1960s aiming to make Sweden self-sufficient with respect to nuclear technology. The plan was to combine civil power production with military plutonium production, should Sweden decide to develop nuclear weapons. The program included, among other things, domestic uranium mining, domestic uranium fuel production, operation of heavy-water reactors and a plutonium laboratory.
The Ågesta nuclear power plant just outside Stockholm was part of the program. The reactor, also known as R3/Adam, was in operation in 1964-1974. The reactor was an underground, heavy-water cooled and heavy-water moderated pressurized reactor, providing district heat and a modest amount of electricity to the near-by suburb Farsta. After being closed down, the heavy water was sold to Canada while the fuel and some other equipment were removed. Large parts of the facility were preserved for several decades, but is now undergoing decommissioning, a process which is planned to be finalised in 2025.
Within this project we are investigating how to locate and reconstruct historic information on the operation of the Ågesta reactor. Of particular interest is the nuclear fuel and its irradiation history in the reactor. There are many reasons for this: i) information and knowledge management about the operation of a nuclear facility under the “Swedish line”, ii) for assessments regarding to the produced plutonium qualities and quantities and iii) for nuclear safeguards verification of Ågesta fuel before encapsulation and final storage. For operating reactors, information about the fuel and its irradiation in the reactor is typically kept with the operator and follows the fuel as it undergoes transport and spent fuel management. In this case, the information is not straightforward to access, as the information has been distributed among multiple actors, and because custody of various parts of the information has changed over time. In this poster we will describe efforts to retrieve the detailed technical information, results thereof, and the plans for using it to support research related to the topics mentioned above.