A proposal to abolish the uranium ban is being taken by the government on Thursday. The law change is proposed to apply from 1 January 2026, says Romina Pourmokhtari.
Sweden has good conditions to extract what we need, she says.
In a first step, the municipalities will have a certain municipal veto left, however not for smaller extraction in mines where uranium is found as a secondary raw material.
But the government wants to go further and proposed in the summer in a memorandum that uranium mining should not be called a nuclear technical facility, but nuclear technical activity. This means that the rules for municipal veto for uranium mining will no longer apply at all.
S: Continued veto
Thus, a municipality will not be able to stop a miner who wants to search for and extract uranium. When the change is to be adopted is unclear.
But the municipalities will still have some influence through the planning and building law, says Pourmokhtari.
She means that if Sweden is to have nuclear power, one must be open to also extracting the raw material, uranium.
The opposition party The Social Democrats (S) is against opening pure uranium mines but sees the possibility of uranium being handled as a by-product in other mining operations.
We think that the municipalities should have a continued veto against uranium mines. It is just as good that there is a ban at the bottom, given that we can trade with others. On the other hand, we think that there may be an opportunity to use the small streams of uranium that exist in other mines, says Fredrik Olovsson, energy and business policy spokesperson for S.
Compared to Trump
He points out that Swedish nuclear power today purchases uranium from democracies such as Australia and Canada and that these value chains are well established.
The Moderate Party municipal councilor in Falköping, Adam Johansson, is on the same track. He is strongly critical of the government's message.
I think it's regrettable, it's to restrict our municipal self-government, he says to SVT News.
It would in that case mean that Sweden more or less chooses the same path as Trump in that it should be "Sweden first".
The Green party's spokesperson Amanda Lind writes in a comment: "To tear up the ban on uranium mining is a huge betrayal of those who live near Sweden's uranium deposits."
