Day 61

Day 61 of Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine. The Finnish parliament began debating NATO membership last week. Russia already warned over a month ago that Finland joining the Western alliance would “require retaliatory measures” on its part, with Sergei Belyayev, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s European department, promising “serious military and political consequences”.

More recently, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said Russia would be forced to increase its military presence in the Baltic. He went so far as to threaten ending the “nuclear-free” status of the region, which surely means at least deploying nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad. (Whether they have been there all along is another question.)

A week or so ago a video was shared on social media supposedly showing Russia military equipment moving along a highway toward the Finnish border. That turned out to be from some years ago, so in no way evidence of a recent threat.

In fact, a Finnish expert estimates that Russian forces normally based near Finland have been “severely degraded” since the war in Ukraine started. So, maybe Russia is less of a threat now than before.

Military equipment is going the other way, however. Finland has now shipped a third wave of arms and military supplies to Ukraine. Unlike in the first wave, the government has not revealed specially what was included in the more recent shipments.

Meanwhile, Finland is reducing its dependence on Russian energy. Starting yesterday, Finland has started cutting back on the electricity it imports from Russia, which is reportedly about a third of its electricity imports and 10% of its total consumption. Luckily, much of the shortfall from the loss of Russian power can be compensated by Finland’s fifth nuclear reactor when it finally comes fully online soon.

Until a mere two years ago Russia was Finland’s only source of natural gas, via a cross-border pipeline. That one has now been supplemented by an undersea pipeline from Estonia that can supply up to a third of Finland's LNG needs. We are otherwise not as dependant on Russia as are Germany or other countries anyway, since natural gas accounts for only 6% of energy consumptions here. 

In any case, Finland will stop all gas imports from Russia and turn to other sources to replace it, which means importing via tanker ships -- despite currently having no LNG terminals where to offload the ships. As a temporary solution, it has agreed with Estonia to share a floating LNG terminal to be used to supply both countries with non-Russian gas.

Reducing dependence on Russian crude oil (70% of Finnish oil imports) and coal (about half of imports) is also underway. While existing contracts are still being honored, no new ones being signed. The Finnish state railway company is also being pressured to stop transporting Russian coal through Finland for export to other countries well before the EU sanctions deadline of August. 

It seems clear that Finland will likely never return as the good customer it was for Russia's energy business, even after the bloody war in Ukraine finally concludes.

Taking Out The Trash, Finnish Style

We have, behind our coat closet, a narrow enclosed space where our sauna used to be. That was before we did a big house renovation almost ten years ago. I call it “the pantry”, since we keep various foodstuffs there, among other things. It is also were we collect our recycling, and taped to the wall is a piece of paper, you might say an improvised "recycling chart", to help me keep track of plastics.

My "Energy Waste for Dummies" visual aid.

I created this little visual aid back when my daughter became involved in her school’s ympäristöraati (environmental council). She wanted to make sure that we sorted all our plastic refuse properly for energy waste. She was amused at the time that I would need any printed guideline for this little task, since the basic rule comes down to this:  all categories of plastic could be put in the big cardboard box we used for energy waste except for one type, “Number 3” plastics. This is polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

At the time, only the other six recyclable types of plastic could safely be disposed of as energy waste. This meant they could be burned in electric power plants, specifically “waste-to-energy” plants that use such trash for fuel, an overall appealing alternative to burning fossil fuels.

PVC, because of its high chloride content, was different. Incinerating it in Finland's current WtE plants would result in unacceptably high levels of dioxins, one of the more hazardous of chemical pollutants. Instead of being mixed in with our energy waste, PVC needed to go in our regular trash to be hauled away and buried in a landfill.

While we haven’t normally accumulated more than our share of energy waste, which consists mostly of food containers and such, the box in our “pantry” often overflowed well before we got around to emptying it. This was because there weren’t really many places to take it, unlike regular recycling.

According to my very unscientific observations, Finns are avid recyclers. I take it to be part of the nature-loving, conscientious, and thrifty character of Finns. In our house, we fit in very well into that stereotype.

I’m not really sure how recycling is organized in metropolitan America, since I’ve never lived in any US city of any size (no bigger than, say, 70,000), and even that was some 30 years ago. Still, my impression is that recycling for most Americans is often a curbside affair, with folks putting their paper, glass, what not, out on the sidewalk for scheduled pickups.

They don’t do that here, at least not in Helsinki. Instead, there are public ekopisteet (eco points), large dumpster-like bins for household recycling strategically scattered around the city.

Our local ekopiste, on one of the rare sunny days this winter.

You generally don’t have to go far to find one. In the back lot of a grocery store a five-minute walk from us is a 15-meter-long (50-foot) row of dumpsters for cardboard (kartonki), paper, small metal, colored glass, clear glass, and used clothes (for donation to two different charities). But nothing for energy waste.

There’s a second, smaller ekopiste, also a five-minute walk away, for just paper and donated clothes. Plus, most apartment complexes have their own, private ekopisteet. Like I say, they're not hard to find.

Because we make regular visits to these local ekopisteet to unload our latest accumulation of paper, cardboard, glass and metal, there isn’t that much left to go into the normal trash container under our sink.

In fact, because we also compost all our veggie waste, we manage with having our sidewalk garbage can (240 liters, or some 60 gallons) emptied only every four weeks. (In Helsinki, you can choose how frequently the garbage truck comes by. Four weeks is the maximum interval.) The monthly garbage pick-up has always worked fine for us, and that was even when all three kids were still living at home.

Energy waste was the only part of the recycling routine that has been less than convenient, and that’s mostly been down to the issue of what to do with it.

Generally, there have been surprisingly few places in Helsinki where you could drop off energy waste, and these were mostly in the parking garages of some cross-town shopping malls that we didn’t often frequent.

That changed last September. Alongside the Porvoontie highway in Vantaa, sits a strangely modern-looking, massive blue-toned building, a new waste-to-energy power plant, the biggest in Finland.

Vantaa Energy says its new plant, fed with household garbage from the wider Helsinki area, will reduce the company’s consumption of fossil fuels by 30% while providing not only electricity for Vantaa, but also almost half of the city’s district heating.

I’ve read that a number of America’s biggest cities also use district heating (where the heating for entire neighborhoods is piped in from a centralized source), but I have no idea how widespread it really is. I can’t recall ever hearing of its use anywhere in Georgia, at least not on a large scale. But then again, having enough heat isn’t usually much of a concern in a state known for its long, sweltering summers.

In Finland, where the only thing sweltering (and sometimes long) are its saunas, about half of the homes are heated this way.

Our house, built in 1980 when the subdivision that now surrounds it on one side didn’t exist yet, is off the grid in that sense. We supply our own heating, previously with an oil-burning furnace that of course relied on liquid hydrocarbons pumped from the ground and delivered every year or so to our home by truck.

When we did the big renovation almost a decade ago, we could have chosen to also tap into the district heating that warms the row houses across the street.

The neighborhood's other ekopiste.

Instead, we nudged ourselves even a bit more off the grid and switched to a source of heat closer to home. In fact, right beneath our home. In the ground, no less. We had a geothermal system installed, provided by a transplanted Canadian who has set up what is apparently a thriving business selling earth-heating systems here.

It works great. It keeps our house plenty warm enough in winter (at our normal setting of 20 degrees C, or 70 Fahrenheit). 

That is, unless the weather outside turns especially cold, something like -20C (-5F), for more than a day or two. Then we have to switch on the system’s electric back-up heating to get some extra BTUs into the radiators. This year, that hasn’t been necessary even once.

We don’t generate our own electricity, of course, but we have some control over where it comes from. We buy our power from one of the many companies here that provide it only from renewable sources, which last year accounted for over a third (36%) of the 68 terawatt hours generated in Finland. The comparable figure for the US is 12%.

Though not blessed with the mountainous terrain of, say, Norway (which despite being an oil-producing country gets nearly all its electricity from hydropower), Finland still generates more than half of its renewable energy from water. Most of the rest comes from burning wood waste, mostly byproducts from the forestry and papermaking industries. Wind power is negligible, so far.

Another third of Finland’s power comes from fossil fuels, mostly coal and gas (for the US that’s 67%). You could also arguably throw into this category one of the fasting growing sources of fuel – peat. While not exactly a “fossil” fuel – not yet anyway – peat grows so slowly in the abundant bogs of Finland that it’s hard to think of it as “renewable”. It’s considered one of the dirtiest sources of energy here.

The cleanest source, at least in terms of greenhouse gasses, made up the remaining third of power production last year. That's nuclear power. Finland’s reliance on nuclear is a bit higher than the EU average (27%), but lower than neighboring Sweden (43%) and much lower than atomic powerhouse France (73%). And it’s way ahead of nuclear-shy America, which gets only 20% of its electric needs from splitting atoms.

Graphic by Tomia

With the opening of Vantaa Energy’s new plant, even my family has become a tiny source, sometimes a smelly one, of power, as our humble household garbage is now destined to help turn some giant turbine just off Porvoontie.

And because the new plant is also designed to burn even PVC cleanly (so we’ve understood), Type 3 plastic is no longer a concern for us. We can now just lump it in with all our other refuse, instead of letting it spill out all over the pantry.

Maybe I could also finally take down my improvised recycling chart and toss it in the trash...ah, I mean, in our recycling.

The F-word

A while back, writing about the crisis in Ukraine, I made a reference to the notion of “Finlandization”, and mentioned that it’s a Cold War era term that Finns might well “bristle at”, if indeed you could detect the sometimes stony-faced Finns bristling at anything. 

Well, some “bristling”, some serious bristling, was indeed on display recently, and at the highest levels of government. 

It was all part of the fallout from a political row involving Russia, nuclear energy, and, I guess, personality politics. 

The government of Prime Mister Alexander Stubb recently made the somewhat surprising announcement that Finland will proceed with construction of its third nuclear power plant in partnership with Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear-energy corporation. 

Currently, there are two nuclear plants, both in southern Finland at Loviisa and Olkiluoto, consisting of four reactors, all dating from the 70s and 80s. The construction of a fifth reactor, Olkiluoto 3, by the TVO consortium is currently six years behind schedule. 

Undeterred by that delay, TVO and another consortium, Fennovoima, have applied separately to build a proposed sixth and seventh reactor. 

Last year, Fennovoima selected Rosatom, which owns 34% of the consortium, to build its proposed reactor at a new site on Finland’s northwestern coast, pending final approval from the Finnish government. 

In its recently announced decision, the government rejected the TVO application, apparently thanks to TVO’s struggle to actually get its third reactor built. 

At the same time, the government gave Fennovoima, and its partner Rosatom, the green light -- and this despite the current uncertain atmosphere of sanctions surrounding any dealings with Russia after its annexation of Crimea and apparent interference in Ukraine's Donbas region. 

The surprise decision caused a big fracture in Stubb’s cabinet, triggering the Environment Minister, Ville Niinistö (coincidentally, nephew of President Sauli Niinistö) to lead his party, the Green League, out of the government coalition. The Greens had previously threatened to do just this if any new nuclear plants were approved. 

But Ville Niinistö was harshly critical not only of the plans build more nuclear plants, but also of the greater energy dependence on Russia that the government’s decision will bring. In an interview with the Financial Times, he likened it to Finland bowing to the wishes of the Soviet Union, back in the bad ol’ days of the Cold War. 

“There is a sense of Finlandization here,” Niinistö was quoted by the FT as saying. “We are giving the Russians the very leverage they are looking for with the west and the EU. This puts us into a very vulnerable position . . . Bluntly speaking, it is totally bewildering that the rest of the government thinks this is OK.”

The use of the word Finlandization was a bit too much for some, causing a couple of prominent politicians to question Niinistö’s patriotism. 

Whether or not there is any validity to the idea that 40 or 50 years ago Finland might have felt it necessary, quite understandably, to thread a very fine needle when co-existing with a prickly and unpredictable (and, not to mention, heavily nuclear-armed) neighbor, the criticism implied by the F-word is not taken lightly here, even now, even from other Finns.