A 100,000-Year Tomb for Finland’s Nuclear Waste: VIDEO
A 100,000-Year Tomb for Finland’s Nuclear Waste
Other countries have hit political roadblocks in finding a lasting fix to the world’s nuclear-waste problem. Finland, meanwhile, has been quietly breaking ground
By Zeke Turner | Photographs by Juuso Westerlund/Moment/INSTITUTE for The Wall Street Journal
OKILUOTO, Finland—In billion-year-old bedrock, 100 stories below ground, the Finns have found what the whole world is looking for: A place to bury their most dangerous nuclear waste.
From the U.S. to the U.K., Germany and Japan, plans to dig tombs for the highly radioactive fuel rods have hit political roadblocks or faced backlash from locals who don’t want toxic waste in their backyards.
But Finland has been quietly breaking ground.
On this Baltic Sea island off the Finnish coast, the country’s two main nuclear-power companies have just begun digging the main chambers of a tunnel system they aim to complete by 2020 to safely house 6,500 tons of spent uranium for the next 100,000 years.
A drill and the beginnings of a tunnel at Onkalo, the nuclear-waste storage facility on Finland’s Olkiluoto island.
But building deep-rock storage bunkers isn’t just a challenge for engineers and scientists. Finland also stands out in how it has managed the project’s tricky politics, using financial incentives to frame the decision to host the site as a boon for locals rather than a perceived threat.
“I would congratulate the Finns on having made the progress to get to this point,” said Peter Swift, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, the Lockheed Martin -operated U.S. lab overseeing parts of America’s final storage site. “They’ve gotten further than anyone else has.”
Around the world, the majority of spent nuclear fuel—which remains radioactive for thousands of years—is stored in cooling pools at reactor sites or, once cooled, in steel casks sheathed in concrete. But neither method is a long-term fix, industry experts and advocacy groups say. The pools, which are filling up, can break down over decades, and both methods have raised concerns about the high costs and adequacy of security to protect them from disasters or potential attacks.
Scientists largely agree that deep-in-the-earth burial sites are the safest way to dispose of the most dangerous radioactive waste, though finding the right geological conditions can be expensive and time-consuming. Once the spent fuel rods are meticulously buried inside, these high-tech underground tunnel systems are backfilled and sealed shut.
But politics often block these projects before the digging begins.
Plans for the U.S.’s Yucca Mountain facility, 90 miles from Las Vegas, for instance were stalled in 2010 by then-Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who strangled the project’s funding in spending bills. The now-retired Democratic Senate leader called the rods “the most poisonous substance known to man."
A hooded Siemens turbine rotor waiting to be used in a turbine hall in Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant.
A German scheme to use the country’s Gorleben salt mine as a storage site was derailed after federal politicians in Berlin failed to get local approval behind the project, a political third rail. In Japan, the government spent years asking communities to host sites before giving up and asking scientists to make a shortlist.
Nuclear OptionResearchers in Finland are constructing a massive underground tomb for nuclear waste. When nuclear fuel is no longer useful for generating power, it is still dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. The Onkalo facility is designed to store this waste for at least 100,000 years.
And after a county council rejected in 2013 a burial site for highly radioactive waste in Cumbria in northwestern England, the U.K. is starting from scratch canvassing 13 regions of Wales, England and Northern Ireland for volunteers to host a site in what a spokesman for the U.K.’s Radioactive Waste Management office called “a community-led process.”
Hans Forsström, senior adviser at SKB International, the consulting arm of Swedish nuclear waste-management company Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, said the Finnish plans were carefully designed “in a way that it won’t affect the people on the surface.”
"To get their trust is the difficult part,” he said.
Under a nuclear law passed in 1987, Finnish counties that host nuclear sites were given veto power to stop projects. This sent the message that no community would be forced to host a bunker. Then, the Finnish nuclear-waste company announced in 1992 that it was considering five potential sites. Politicians in those municipalities were left competing over who would get to host the project and collect property taxes from the company, according to Matti Kojo, an expert on Finland’s nuclear policy at the University of Tampere.
The municipality of Eurajoki, whose Olkiluoto island is the site of two of Finland’s nuclear plants, won by offering the most land to the waste company and reasoning that the majority of Finland’s radioactive waste was already stored temporarily there. Construction of the site began in 2004.
Some Finnish environmental activists have voiced reservations about the project, calling for more studies before construction of the underground storage continues.
“Even the hardest bedrock we have on earth, which is here, will be cracked” during the ice ages expected in the next 100,000 years, said Finnish Greenpeace spokesman Juha Aromaa. Over that long stretch of time, “we can’t be sure that the waste wouldn’t leak with groundwater into the Baltic Sea.” he said.
Still, other opponents of nuclear energy in Finland have largely focused their efforts on preventing the construction of new reactors, according to Kari Ylikoski, who chairs the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation’s executive committee in the surrounding Satakunta province. “This solution is the best possible solution to this problem we must solve,” he said of the storage site.
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