ZUG. A maker of nuclear power plants is moving to a country that banned building them. Copenhagen Atomics, the Danish developer of small thorium reactors, is transferring its headquarters to Zug, where it registered a subsidiary named Zug Atomics in the commercial register in May and is now recruiting managers for the site. Co-founder Thomas Jam Pedersen sits on the new company’s board.
The reason, Pedersen told the SonntagsZeitung and Le Matin Dimanche, is Brussels. The European Union is over-regulated and hostile to industry, he said, and survival there is becoming impossible for start-ups. The United States, briefly considered, fails a different test: from American soil the company could never sell reactors to China. Switzerland, he concluded, is the ideal location.
The company has built two reactor prototypes in Denmark, each the size of a shipping container, and plans serial production of its thorium fuelled units from 2031. At full power, one unit could supply roughly 50,000 households. Thorium, its backers argue, produces far less long-lived waste than the uranium fuel of conventional plants.
A test reactor at Villigen
Switzerland is not unfamiliar territory for the Danes. Copenhagen Atomics announced in May that it wants to test a reactor with the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, canton Aargau, part of the federal ETH domain, and hopes to hold the necessary permits by 2028. The Zug move formalises a presence that the Villigen plan began.
Deliberately timed, or deliberately not
The announcement lands days before the start of the most contentious energy campaign in years. Parliament decided in June to end the ban on building new nuclear plants, a left and green coalition answered with a referendum that reached Bern with 131,800 signatures, and the national vote follows in February. A decade after voters endorsed the phase-out of atomic energy, the country is about to argue about it all over again.
Copenhagen Atomics insists the vote changes nothing for them: the headquarters move goes ahead even if Switzerland says no in February. That claim will be tested by the campaign, which now has a concrete address in Zug to argue about. Supporters of new nuclear capacity will point to a high technology employer choosing Switzerland; opponents will note that a company which needs no Swiss power plant to succeed is arriving precisely because the rules elsewhere are strict.
For Zug, the calculus is simpler. The canton has spent years building a technology cluster, including a CHF 110 million ETH learning factory, on the back of low taxes and fast permits. A reactor maker on the commercial register is the loudest proof yet that the formula travels.