After LKAB's announcement on Thursday, it is clear that two-thirds of Kiruna's residents will need to move due to the mine.
Whether it will be enough in the future cannot be said today, according to the mining company. It depends on how much deeper into the existing mine the company will drill in the future and also how the new discoveries in Per Geijer, where rare earth metals have been found, will affect it.
We do not have the answers to that today, but we will have to come back to it, says Stefan Hämäläinen and continues:
But what we see at present is that the area we have now described that we will need to take into use, also largely coincides with the future area.
Large rock masses
It is clear that the new center, which will replace the old one, will not need to be moved "during our lifetime", according to Hämäläinen.
Yesterday's announcement, which affects 6,000 Kiruna residents, has taken several years to come to. It has, among other things, required test drilling throughout the city.
The work of developing a plan for the new city move was intensified after a tremor in 2020 that showed a new type of impact on the properties that the company had not seen before.
We are now at great depths and extracting. It is the world's largest underground mine for iron ore, it is very large rock masses that we are affecting and putting in motion, says Stefan Hämäläinen.
Otherwise stays
That the announcement of the city move comes just a few days after the big celebration of the church move in the city is a coincidence, he thinks.
To succeed with the urban transformation in just ten years, three basic criteria must be met according to LKAB. They must have the people of Kiruna with them, the Swedish state must release land and that land must be planned by the municipality so that LKAB can build.
Otherwise, the mine stays and that's probably what nobody wants.
But it's not an engineering process where you can do things just like a project, you also have to handle people and feelings and make sure that this community over time is also attractive, says Hämäläinen.
