1. GENERAL INFORMATION 1.1. General Overview

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: 1980; Arctic; Norway; Sodankylä; North Finland; Northern Finland; Lapland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.145.835; http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/cnpp2003/CNPP_Webpage/PDF/2002/Documents/Documents/Finland%202002.pdf

Finland (in Finnish Suomi) is a republic in northern Europe, bounded on the north by Norway, on the east by Russia, on the south by the Gulf of Finland and Estonia, on the south-west by the Baltic Sea and on the west by the Gulf of Bothnia and Sweden. Nearly one third of the country lies north of the Arctic Circle. The area of Finland, including 31 557 km 2 of inland water, totals 338 000 km 2. The terrain is generally level, hilly areas are more prominent in the north and mountains are found only in the extreme north-west. The average July temperature in the capital Helsinki on the southern coast is 17 °C. The February average in Helsinki is about-5.7 °C. The corresponding figures at Sodankylä (Lapland) in the northern Finland are 14.1 °C and-13.6 °C. Precipitation (snow and rain) averages about 460 mm in the north and 710 mm in the south. Snow covers the ground for four to five months a year in the south, and about seven months in the north. Finland has a population of 5.167 million (estimate July 2000) and an average population density of 17 per km 2 of land. Historical population data is shown in Table 1. The predicted annual population growth rate between the years 1998 and 2010 is 0.21 %. More than two thirds of the population reside in the southern third of the country. In Finland the total primary energy consumption 1 per capita was about 60 % higher than the European Union average (according to 1996 statistics) and about 35 % higher than the OECD average. This is mainly due to the weather, which demands space heating for most of the time, and the structure of the industry, which is energy intensive processing industry (wood, especially paper, heavy metal and chemical). A third factor is relatively high transportation requirements per capita caused by the low population density.