Sixty-seven companies pooled their ambitions into a single bet. In 2007, a consortium of Finnish businesses formed Fennovoima Oy with one purpose: to build a new nuclear power plant that would supply ten percent of Finland's electricity. The site they chose was the Hanhikivi peninsula, a windswept finger of land jutting into the Gulf of Bothnia near the small municipality of Pyhajoki. The reactor they selected was Russian -- a VVER-1200 pressurised water reactor designed by Rosatom, the state-owned nuclear corporation. It was a marriage of Finnish energy ambition and Russian nuclear engineering that would unravel spectacularly fifteen years later, leaving nothing on the peninsula but cleared ground and broken contracts.
Finland's nuclear licensing process is methodical, even by Nordic standards. In April 2010, the Finnish Government granted Fennovoima a decision-in-principle to build the reactor. Parliament ratified it that July. But choosing a reactor supplier took three more years of negotiations. Areva and Toshiba both bid for the contract. Rosatom won. On 21 December 2013, Fennovoima and Rosatom Overseas signed the plant supply contract, with commissioning projected for 2024. The chosen design was the AES-2006, the latest evolution of Russia's VVER reactor family -- a proven lineage, on paper at least. What followed was a cascade of subcontracts and partnerships that read like a directory of European heavy industry: Alstom for the turbine generators, Rolls-Royce and Schneider Electric for automation. When Rolls-Royce withdrew in 2018, Framatome and Siemens stepped in. Each substitution added months to the timeline.
The original commissioning date of 2024 began to slip almost immediately. Bringing Rosatom's design documentation up to Finnish regulatory standards proved far more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Finland's nuclear safety authority, STUK, held to its exacting requirements regardless of the political pressure to get the plant built. By December 2018, Fennovoima announced a revised schedule: construction license in 2021, commercial operation by 2028. Then that target slipped too. In April 2021, the company pushed construction to 2023 and operation to 2029. The plant had been in development for fourteen years without a single foundation being poured. Debt financing remained partially unresolved as late as 2017, and the estimated cost -- initially pitched at less than fifty euros per megawatt-hour -- became an increasingly theoretical figure.
When Russian forces crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, the geopolitical ground shifted beneath every European energy project tied to Moscow. For Fennovoima, the calculation was suddenly stark. Their reactor supplier was a Russian state corporation. Their entire project depended on Rosatom delivering the nuclear island -- the core of the plant. In May 2022, Fennovoima terminated the contract, citing significant delays and Rosatom's inability to deliver the project. The war had made the risks impossible to accept, but the cracks had been visible for years. A Dispute Review Board later ruled in December 2022 that the contract repeal was unlawful under the terms of the agreement, adding legal complexity to an already painful unraveling. The Hanhikivi peninsula returned to quiet.
From the air, the Hanhikivi headland is unremarkable -- low terrain meeting cold water at 64 degrees north, birch forest thinning toward the coast. No cooling towers rise from the landscape. No containment domes interrupt the flat horizon. The site exists as a monument to a particular moment in European energy history, when Finland looked east for nuclear power and the world rearranged itself before the reactor could be built. Finland's other nuclear plants at Loviisa and Olkiluoto continue to operate, and the country eventually commissioned the long-delayed Olkiluoto 3 reactor in 2023. But Hanhikivi stands as a reminder that energy infrastructure is never purely technical. It is always, unavoidably, political.
Located at 64.53N, 24.26E on the Hanhikivi peninsula along the Gulf of Bothnia coast. The site is flat coastal terrain with no built structures of note -- the plant was never constructed. Nearest airport is Oulu (EFOU), approximately 100 km to the north. Kokkola-Pietarsaari Airport (EFKK) lies roughly 90 km to the south. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet to appreciate the peninsula's geography and its position on the Bothnian coastline. The cleared site area may be visible in good conditions.