Swedish minister eyes energy crisis steps, blames German nuclear phase-out
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
That said, it would had been better in Sweden if they hadn't phased out nuclear too! There is a electricity shortage in south of Sweden where industries are denied establishing new initiatives.
Sweden started phasing out nuclear in 1999 and has since closed 6 of 12 reactors.
- Barsebäck B1 and B2 was closed in 1999.
- Oskarshamn O1 and O2 was closed in 2015 and 2017.
- Rinhals R1 and R2 was closed in 2019 and 2020.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4rnkraft_i_Sverige#Avvec...
Sweden has an overproduction of energy, it is just generally generated in the north (where the hydro is) and consumed in the south (where the people are).
The 'shortage in the south' is just a political lens for explaining the high prices from the introduction of energy zones in 2011. Before then, there was one price for electricity in Sweden and this worked to the benefit of the consumer.
Stepping back, do we really want the south to invest in _generating_ electricity? And if so, at what granularity? At the kommun level, or the län? At what point is that granularity ok but the whole-of-Sweden granularity that we had before the privatisation push is not ok?
Yes, that's because all the industry had to move because of the no energy in sweden.
There is no energy shortage in Sweden. They can export as little or as much power as they want. But of course with prices being high that means they export a fair bit and that causes prices to rise. Which is causing Sweden to make a lot of money from this business.
If they want lower prices locally, they should look at their local energy market, infrastructure, and regulations instead of blaming the Germans for being able to pay market rates for energy to Sweden.
This statement definitely needs a source.
The EU have laws that require 70% of the produces electricity to be on the market.
Source, in Swedish: https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/om-elmarknaden/export-oc...
The last government at least put in place windfall taxes to pay us back during the massive cost increase in the first winter after Russia invaded Ukraine. We got compensated a few months later the prices went insane. The current government already said they won't do that, which is rather absurd since a lot of our electricity is generated by Vatenfall, a state company.
End users should not suffer under government / market fuckery.
Can you explain?
Now the situation is different, and physics applies once more, everybody is screaming, but reality be a harsh mistress- she careth not for the sobbing.
Despite it being entirely their doing from almost 15 years of the Conservative government.
"“I realise that nobody is happy when I say that ‘if we hadn't shut down half of nuclear power, we wouldn't have these problems’. But it's true and it needs to be said.”, Kristersson said, referring to the previous Social Democrat-Greens coalition closing several nuclear reactors between 2019 and 2020 as part of a policy shift towards greater reliance on renewable energy sources."
The Swedish Green coalition before them also did shutdowns like the German greens did. And now they have to suffer the consequences.
Note that a lot of people are very shortsighted and might think "energy prices were better with the previous greens/labour/etc". They need to be reminded the causes of the crisis.
The Greens do not get to have their cake and eat it when they are, in fact, directly one of the sources of the current german problem. Those 232g CO2/kWH as I write (and over 700 last week) is exactly what they asked for when they pushed for a full renewable energy grid backed by hopes and dreams.
Do you mean they are puppets of the Greens and as opposition to red-green government could not reverse policies they have considered harmful?
> directly one of the sources of the current german problem
From 2005 to 2021 it was Merkel & Co in the government making most of the energy-related decisions, yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?
> It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.
How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation? It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant. It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least, will be the most expensive energy on the market and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie. Especially when your purposefully ignore the next sentence, which still puts the blame on Merkel & Friends for continuing to implement it, in their case because it was lucrative to sign agreements with Russia for gas.(Especially this sack of shit Gerhard Schröder.)
>How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation?
Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020), because of this:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/24h
There has not been a _single_ day, a single month, a single year where the german electricity production has been under 200g eqCO2/kWh. Not a single one. The entire project has been slowly killing the planet, one day at a time, because technically illiterate and incompetent people have been leading your country.
>It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant.
While recent developments in Europe have been funny, to say the least (lol Flamanville/Hinkley Point C/Okilouto), half of these costs are caused by incredibly tight regulations, and another huge part has been caused by a gigantic loss of talent, which tends to happen when you demonize an entire industry for 30 years. There's also the fact that most of the recent constructions are new designs, which, yeah, require discovering flaws, unfortunately. China has 5-year construction speeds for nuclear plants using proven designs.
> It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least
Considering renewables have not been solving anything in the past ten years alone, and will not solve anything in the net 10 years either, how about we start looking a little bit further than our noses and build _both_ ?
>will be the most expensive energy on the market
1/ lol lies 2/ lol renewables literally not working for a whole week in germany last week 3/ lol germany pushing for a common energy market where the price of the energy is based on the most expensive energy source available. Nuclear will never be the most expensive as long as we have gas burners for 400€/kWh.
>and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
Aside from the fact that I can _absolutely seriously suggest that_ and that I wouldn't take geopolitics lessons from Germany, thank you, we can also discover new sources of raw uranium (hell, even France is full of it, it's just cheaper to get it from Niger despite the instabilities), we can work forward on reusing and making nuclear "waste" useful (Breeder reactors have been an option, killing Superphénix was a mistake (but also the right choice from a financial perspective), keep it as a research reactor).
Germany has had an absolutely blind and ignorant world view of energy production, making it an absolute catastrophe of an energy market that gets covered by other european countries. It's not renewables OR nuclear. It's never been, and that a dichotomy that's been pushed forwards by morons. It's both. I'll be perfectly happy to turn off every single nuclear reactor in the world the day we guarantee all of our needs are fully covered by renewables ,which is going to require a _lot_ of overcapacity, or a globalized electricity grid (I thought depending on Africa and Russia was a bad idea?).
Renewables aren't the solution. They're part of it, and as it stands, aren't enough. Turn off your fucking coal burners and build nuclear, now.
And I didn’t say that. Who is defensive?
> Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020)
2016-2020 - Merkel government.
Overall most of what you say here can and should be attributed to conservative/socialist parties which were in charge and use green agenda opportunistically rather than strategically. Making greens as a root source of all problems is a lie, simply because they did not make most of those harmful decisions. Regulation is mostly not on them too. I am not big fan of German greens myself, but things should be made straight on this matter: German problem are not greens, German problem are boomers which do not care about change. Most of mainstream politics in Germany is captured by special interests groups, old dudes from some Verein, Kammer or other medieval guild, lobbying to preserve their moats and privileges. Nuclear power has lost the game to Fukushima fears and Chernobyl fallout, but it is a secondary matter. It could have been useful or not, that’s a matter of calculations deep in strategic documents. Last document I saw considered them unpractical. You are right, we do need energy strategy, but honestly I think Germany is incapable of producing it. EU should take it over, it has more momentum and political diversity to figure this out. And it makes sense anyway, not just to regulate the market, but to build.
Regarding the uranium production, yes, there are some expensive deposits in Europe. We have high population density so even if environmental concerns are addressed, they will cost a lot. Post-processing of the waste is going to cost a lot. It is by no means the same price as 20-40 years ago. Can it fully replace gas? I doubt so. Is it the only alternative? I doubt so. We are talking about 20-30 years, the horizon on which we may really see the effects of nuclear scale-up. The renewables will be much more advanced by then, grids more robust and efficient. We may not have the same problems as we have now to be solved by nuclear. So the question is really, does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?
I now see that you have been arguing in bad faith since the beginning and should not have wasted time, down to repeating exact arguments from the greens that have, so far, proved to be wronged and dragged Germany into one of the worst emitters of Europe.
Good luck with your dreams, knowing you're dragging all of us down with you.
I‘m not acting in bad faith, I just don’t see how is your argumentation relevant to my original comment above. What I would expect to agree with you is the causal link making greens primarily responsible for current situation. As I pointed out, I do not see it simply because other parties were long enough in the government not only to undo things, but to build something on their own.
And I honestly, being relatively familiar with the topics, cannot see how nuclear power industry could save us if it were restarted couple years ago. The reports from German research teams show otherwise. If you have more data on viability of this approach, please feel free to share.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in the future, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post respectfully and thoughtfully in the future. If you had edited out the swipes from your comments, as the rules request, they would have been fine.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on? We'd appreciate it. Also, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433724 downthread.
A nuclear reactor takes much longer than she's been at the office to build, and the Germans would still siphon off most of that electricity driving the price high nevertheless.
Wind obviously wouldn't solve it (since, you know, the energy prices were so high because the wind didn't blow).
The other actual solution would be something drastic like break away from EU energy market, is that what you're suggesting?
Either way, she's responsible. The Germans are not. Their actions are an external factor she should have compensated for.
She is not at fault for Swedens disastrous energy politics.
Especially if the country shut downs their nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis, while there are laws in place that mandate energy exchange between different EU and EU adjacent countries(Norway).
Did they have time to handle it? No, adjusting your grid to be resilient to such bad actors takes more time.
When war in Ukraine started and sourcing cheap gas has become a problem - energy is is more than just electricity, although some of gas was also used for that.
Please, don't tie your economy to cheap gas from one source and try to bring everyone down with you when the access to it is constrained.
Compared to 2022, the spot market prices in Germany are lower in both 2023 (significantly) and 2024. [2]
Seems a bit odd that the nuclear exit in Germany did not create large issues, but is wrecking havoc on Sweden.
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average/chart.htm?l=...
It didn't have any effect until the nets and markets were connected. They couldn't outbid us before that.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average/chart.htm?l=...
What about energy storage systems, e.g. using green gas?
There seem to be more green options than nuclear power.
As long as there is enough production capacity (using fossil fuels), it isn't a serious problem, even though not ideal.
Storage systems are economically viable only if there is a high price difference, especially when you have to pay twice the network fee (recently temporarily dropped in Germany).
CO2 pricing will increase the price difference with time (renewable energy stays cheap and fossil backups will be more expensive, making room on the market for businesses storing energy)
I bet on gas or liquids.
Except... it was not.
Here.
And somewhere, the sun is shining.
People need to _stop_ thinking energy production is hyperlocal when, in reality, it is not.
And never has been.
Now, swedes are complaining, germans (i.e. me) are buying energy and raising prices. There will be a time, when they will import energy from us. Just as much as we exported energy to France when half their atomic powerplants have been shutdown due to no cooling water available.
Is it helpful to beancount each and any time more energy has been exported than imported or the other way around? No, i don't think so.
And yes, the next big challenge is to build grid-level energy storage.
Yes, with batteries. No, hydrogen is not the answer. Batteries it is. Get moving, stop complaining.
Sweden is pretty self-sufficient in power generation, most times I've checked the electricity interchange maps we are exporting electricity, never caught a moment where we imported significant amounts of it.
I'd very much like to not pay exorbitant prices because Germany's energy policies have been misguided, I understand suffering it during a time of crisis (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine) but right now it hurts on many fronts: German's proto-recession (caused in part by high cost of energy) affects Swedish exports since Germany is one of our largest importers; extremely high energy prices shuts down our industry; consumer spending goes down because people get uncertain about prices and buffer more against this uncertainty.
I really like Germany, and have been impressed by the rapid push to renewables after you got fleeced by believing in Russia but it's hard to shake the feeling of resentment on how slow moving your bureaucracy is because of industry's power over your politicians...
what makes you say that?
About energy storage systems, they fall into "risk investment", i.e., something that venture funds would go for. There is risk capital in Sweden but it is a boutique thing: small amounts, hard to find. The average Sven who can invest wants to invest in something safer. Since the government takes the majority of wage-earners' income in taxes[^1], and thus there is not much disposable income, it's up to the government to step in and finance big and even medium-sized infrastructure, and the same applies to risk profiles.
[1]: 63 cents (öre) on every kronor above the amount equivalent to approx 5000 USD/month that an employer would set apart for wages, including self-wages for self-employed people.
Fwiw, nuclear phase-out was a bad call in both Germany and Sweden. New nuclear construction is an equally or worse choice at this moment, with where renewables and storage are today and the trend they are on - prices are already beating nuclear by a large margin and are plummeting, while nuclear keeps getting more expensive each year.
The main issue is that on occasion the markets get out of whack, the price is cheap because a lot of renewable energy is produced in the north, but there isn't enough capacity to transport it to the south. There they then have to fire up e.g. coal plants but this gets paid with other mechanisms and doesn't affect the price. At the same time they refuse to invest in grid upgrades, so they have low transmission costs as well, and also block windmills etc. So in a lot of ways they get to have their cake and eat it.
There are/ were plans for a number of different power links, but some of them have been denied because of environmental concerns (I think! please correct me on that.)
It seems like the basic mental model here is that it would equalize prices between Northern Sweden and Germany, not between Northern and Southern Sweden. And Germany is quite a bit bigger than Northern Sweden. So what should then happen during these German shortfalls is to move the German prices (and Southern Swedish prices) down by an imperceptible amount, while the Northern Swedish prices go up by a ton.
Sweden's energy mess is all about 'free markets'. Back in the old days the state-run energy companies in Sweden produced an overabundance of electricity, mostly from hydro, making Sweden one of the cheapest electricity countries in the world. It was really common to replace wood burners with direct electric radiators in old houses across Sweden.
Then the British conservative party (equiv to the current Swedish administration who the article is about), heavily into privatisation, started selling the public utilities. One thing they did was split network ownership from supplier, so you have one company owning trains and another owning track, and the same for electric net vs generation etc. This created a kind of artificial market, because you can't actually choose with your feet what company has power lines to your house etc. So they invented energy markets and mock auctions and things.
Of course in hindsight all those privatisation thingies are no longer popular. But at the time the rest of Europe thought 'oh that's a good idea!'
Within Sweden the electricity is generally generated in the north and consumed in the south and the socialist governments with their nationalised utilitieshad a fixed cost in the whole country.
Interestingly it was the Danes who complained because they border the south of Sweden and can't generate electricity nearly so cheaply so the cheap cost of Swedish electricity was 'unfair competition'. In 2011 the Swedes had to scrap their fixed one-price policy and introduce 'energy zones' that get increasingly more expensive as you approach Denmark.
Fast forward to today and we have Sweden producing more energy than it consumes, but the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home, meaning the Swedes have to buy their electricity from abroad! We basically logically from a market perspective have electricty flowing out of Sweden to be sold by the utility companies and then back into Sweden to be consumed by households.
And we wonder why there is another winter fuel price shock warning in the offing!
Can anyone name a public utility that was privatised in western Europe and for which a clear case can be made that it was a good thing to do (from the perspective of the country and the public)?
The water companies in regions across the UK were privatised.
Lots of big international companies borrowed lots of money to buy these companies.
The water companies then borrowed large amounts of money, secured against their ability to extract rent from their customers, and the owners used that money to pay of the debt they had incurred in buying the water company, and also paid it as dividends.
So basically the debt burden moved from the buyers to the company they had brought. Neat!
Now a couple of decades later you have these water companies with silly amounts of debt, the technical debt of not maintaining and investing in the infrastructure (they keep blaming the Victorians, but that is just blame spin) and an owner who would be happy to cut ties and let the water company flounder to be rescued by the taxpayer...
There are problems with a lot of things in the world, for instance the rentier economy you mention here. But I don't owe anyone a solution to that just because I want to know which privatisations are the cause of the Swedish energy production and price crisis.
> This blame game is all about supporting current political narratives about nuclear power etc. It's not really about the energy crisis.
In Norway there's a push for nuclear, but I also feel some of it is not honestly about solving anything related to energy. A vocal (minority I hope?) is mostly muddling the water as they're against anything green, so they know this will just stall other things for decades while things are being planned. Or they're against windmills and thus try to push this instead. It's a weird debate, where I certainly can see why nuclear is beneficial or why some people are against, but many of the arguments aren't in good faith.
I don't understand why the Germans closed down nuclear power plants without also building a viable alternative. There are lots of people in Sweden and Norway that don't have a lot of money, and have to skip showers and live in the cold because they can't afford to spend more on electricity.
We were promised a balanced market where the cables would be used to cover temporary spikes and drops in power production. Now it seems that we are subsidising bad German politics instead, and they have not delivered on their part of the deal.
That is what you get when strategical choices are done by ideology and not based on scientific facts.
Germany has a lot tchernobyl-traumatized boomers still associating anything tagged "nuclear" to the doom days from the cold war. These are a significant part of the electorate, specially among the Grunens.
The decision of phasing out nuclear was not rational nor strategical, it was a political choice to please a minority of voters.
Renewable energy with large scale gas power plants (and lots of other types of storage/temporary energy sources and coal for now).
It's just that energy is cheap when renewables are strong and high when they are not (and have to be filled with gas (green in the future), nuclear and coal, which is expensive and partly will be even more expensive in the future, thanks to CO2 pricing (which is good).
> the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home
I don't understand how both statements can be true.
Cables connecting zones (or countries) are limited and move only part of the cheap electricity bids to the next zone. Thus more expensive bids make it raising the price. And there's a cascading effect how cheap energy gradually gets more expensive.
There's a live europe-wide electricity price map showing network events as well. It's very interesting to see how prices grade. And how big difference shows on one side if some connection between regions is down.
Local example here in Lithuania. We have quite fragile connection to Poland which seem to require a lot of maintenance for some reason. If Germany's renewables are doing good and link goes down, our energy prices go up. But if renewables are off and Scandinavian hydros are doing great, then same link going down means very cheap energy here...
The national electricity transmission network in Sweden is still a public utility so the cause for the imbalances in the Swedish electrical grid is not due to privatizations but rather political decisions such as not investing sufficiently in transmission capacity, shutting down nuclear power plants and making it difficult to get approval for wind energy etc.
Then they could have chosen to refund their own consumers, if that's what they wanted.
China is happy to fill in the void.
I mean granted, China's push to expand their solar panel production has led to affordable solar panels for a lot of home owners and communities, massively boosting solar / renewable energy adoption to the point that local energy grids are at capacity. Likewise, their push to expand production of batteries and cars has led to an influx of more affordable cars into Europe.
But isn't that the wish / goal? More renewable energy, less dependence on petrol and gas and the like? It's just that both the US and Europe didn't invest and scale up as much and as fast as China was able to.
China is investing in power generation almost as much as the rest of the world combined. That energy is used by their massive and growing manufacturing industry. Bye bye EU manufacturing like cars.
Note China wasn't even a significant exporter of cars just 10 years ago and now they are becoming dominant.
Germany and the EU dug their grave. It would be hard to undo the damage now.
Sustainability is just incompatible with capitalism
Energy, water, sewage treatment. Nationalize all of it.
Nuclear power is basically taking a loan (national security and trash which has to be stored at least thousands of years) with a huge risk (nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or worse).
It's France 9th biggest export.
Now imagine infinite uranium and everyone using nuclear power. Where would they export now?
This kind of misguided thinking has stopped us from utilizing nuclear power properly. It is a greatest stopgap we have before we find a way to store energy properly and can pivot to renewables.
CO2 isn't a problem of renewables.
In Germany, the problem with renewables is massively scaling green gas production. Storage exists plenty fairly cheap, even for hydrogen (Underground).
Renewables aren't available 24/7, as they work in cycles in most cases(sunlight, tides, waves, wind - geothermal and hydroelectric is an exception, but latter also has problems with damages to ecosystem, and handling sediment travel along the rivers) - this is the most basic problem with them. Grid demands electricity in a way that does not align with the renevable's production, so you need buffers.
So you need to build both energy storage, and energy generation - both are source of pollutants, and eRoI over the whole lifecycle isn't actually that impressive. It is a way to go though, but we are far off from fully transitioning to it.
if you genuinely have to ask that question, you need to read more about energy before you start discussing it. and especially about modern nuclear reactor designs, and how catastrophe in Chernobyl happened(forced orders from above, basically a human failure)
even low efficiency (e.g. hydrogen) is tolerable when renewables otherwise would go to waste
also the amount of storage you have to build also damages the ecosystem.
It's not even close in the same ballpark.
An not every materials production implies inherent co2 emissions.
the amount of storage build for spent nuclear fuel+energy buffer vs buffer for just renewables aren't even in same ballpark. Just do a simple fermi estimation. Btw - the white "smoke" coming out from cooling towers of nuclear power-plant are pure water vapor.
And that's not even going into MSFTs or other reactor types. just traditional ones.
Honestly, such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
I meant the amount of concrete needed (nuclear ppl vs energy storage)
> such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
what faith? renewable vs nuclear debate has nothing to do with the question of the existence of climate change
Remember how solar and wind were considered too expensive for a long time, and all of a sudden they were the cheapest thing available with their construction booming? We're on the verge of that happening with storage as well.
Also swedish government: "Please don't vacuum or do laundry on cold days when everyone has extra heaters on"
Also swedish government: "Everyone's income is public record!"
Also swedish government: "We'll give money to people with large homes. The larger the home the more money they will get, because they have more costs for heating."
Also swedish government: "This money is not income and not public record."
Sweden is a very corrupt capitalist country that is still riding the socialist image they created long ago. But that sweden died with olaf palme. Sweden today is a completely different thing.
Remember that the "corruption index" things are about perception, so if you have a good marketing department (and a police that never arrests anyone for corruption) your citizens will generally not know corruption exists.
I live in sweden. I've seen how police investigates corruption: "pin everything on the immigrant cleaner and pretend the managers who signed the budget didn't know anything about it" is the strategy.
Also the widespread racism that makes most people believe swedish people are inherently honest and immigrants are genetically dishonest helps to sell the story :)
Before you downvote me, go live 10 years in sweden, learn the language and meet people who are born there.
I live in NL and a lot of what you say about Sweden sounds very similar.
Also western supremacy (the notion that western culture is superior in the world) is not the same as white supremacy.
Why do people do desperate things such as robbing other people?
I ONCE met a dutch person who admitted that being a tax haven is nothing of great merit and it was so refreshing :D
I remember arguing with a (racist and violent) dutch guy who claimed portugal is a mediterranean country. I kept saying that you need to be ON the mediterranean to be a mediterranean country. :D
What I don't understand is how the people living here can't see this. It's absolutely incomprehensible how naive they are. I don't know how the state could make it any clearer that it does not share their values and is not what people seem to think it is. That Sweden died long ago.
This is the biggest cultural shock for 100%-eastern-european-me when I'm exposed to western europe. Why would people trust governments, media and so on? I'll never understand it. Do your own due diligence, prepare for the worst and brace for a beating from government which wants to sell you out. Is it a good way to live? Probably not. But looks like it's the natural state.
I'm with you. I came fro the US. Trust is earned.
Meanwhile in Sweden, although I'm no expert of it's history, it looks like government itself decided to do good for shit and giggles. And then happily stuck to it's promise for generations. I've a similar feeling about other somewhat naive countries, e.g. Germany. It was outside forces after WW2. And even for mid-19th century one could argue that uniting German lands under Prussia was a somewhat outside force from perspective of a large chunk of Germans.
So governments had to do social reforms to avoid revolutions.
The fact that now communism is no longer considered a viable option by most people is why now capitalism can go unchecked and reveal its true face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltsj%C3%B6baden_Agreement
> Meanwhile in Sweden, although I'm no expert of it's history
Stick to that intuition. Your story is far from accurate.
Agreements like above are important to labour rights, but it’s little compared to struggles other parts of the world came through. Just like labour rights are little compared to much bigger societal things like attempts to eradicate or assimilate whole ethnicities or force all sorts of social experiments on parts of the society. Where Sweden also has some history too, but it touched very small part of the society. And that society has very similar hostile feelings as far as I know.