Education and training
The Aarhus University/Aarhus Universitet is the only higher education institution which offers a degree specialized in the nuclear field; it specifically offers a PhD in this field.
The Aarhus University/Aarhus Universitet offers also a Nuclear Particle Physics course and it has two research departments involved in the nuclear scope, the Institute for Storage Ring Facilities in Aarhus/ISA and the Department of Physics and Astronomy which research on the field of Subatomic Physics.
There are another institutions involved in the research area as the Institute for Energy Technology, the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen/Kobenhavns Universitet and the centers of the Technical University of Denmark/Danmarks Tekniske Universitet: Center for Atomic-scale Materials Design, Department of Physics and the National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy.
Denmark participates in the Nordic Nuclear Safety Research/Nordisk kernesikkerheds-forskning a platform for Nordic cooperation and competence for nuclear issues.
Human resources and knowledge management
Denmark has no NPP. It had tough three nuclear research reactors, which started up between 1957 and 1960, at the Risø National Laboratory north of Roskilde on the island of Zeeland. DR-1, a 2kWt homogeneous unit from 1957, stopped operating in 2001 and was fully decommissioned in 2006. A 5 MWt pool reactor, DR-2, closed in 1975, and a 10 MWt heavy water reactor, DR-3, closed in 2000. Fuel fabrication facilities for DR-2 and DR-3 were closed in 2002.
Denmark gets most of its electricity from coal, and a substantial amount from wind.
Denmark was once at the forefront of nuclear research and had planned on building nuclear power plants. However, in 1985, the Danish parliament passed a resolution that nuclear power plants would not be built in the country and there is currently little prospect of this resolution being reversed.
The nuclear power industry owes much to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who received the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them. In 1921, Bohr established the Institute for theoretical Physics (renamed the Niels Bohr Institute in 1965), where nuclear fission was verified experimentally for the first time in early 1939.