After four and a half decades of planning, it took only ten hours to drill through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock. It will be the resting place for 6,500 tonnes of hazardous nuclear waste. Sealed 400 metres beneath the earth, its radiation will remain contained for over 100,000 years.
Final digging began last month at Onkalo, a geological disposal facility (GDF) in Finland.
Global nuclear-power output will double by 2050, reckons the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. About 70% of the world’s nuclear waste is currently held in cooling pools or in dry storage. The volume of waste created is small: a typical reactor produces 25-30 tonnes of spent fuel per year, about 0.5% of Onkalo’s capacity. Instead, 14 European countries are currently planning to build their own GDFs.
Since the infancy of nuclear power, scientists have debated how to safely dispose of its waste. GDFs are the gold standard, and Onkalo will be the first on Earth. Posiva, the firm that runs it, aims to have it ready by year’s end. It comes at a time of renewed enthusiasm for the nuclear industry, driven by the desire for carbon-free electricity and wars that have disrupted fossil-fuel supplies. France, Sweden and Slovakia are building reactors. Belgium, Italy and Poland hope to as well. These are vulnerable to decay and unstable weather. For Europe, pooling waste in a handful of shared GDFs would be most efficient. But most countries’ regulations make this impossible. Finnish legislation bars Onkalo from taking waste from plants outside Finland.
