Inside Finland’s tunnel network, 437 meters underground, which will be the world’s first burial site for nuclear waste
Four hundred and thirty-seven meters underground on the southwest coast Finlanda group of geologists advises where to drill holes in two billion year old granite.
This is no ordinary science project: buried here in the bedrock of the city is Onkalo, a network of tunnels destined to become the world’s first permanent radioactive waste disposal site.
When construction is complete in 2120, this toxic graveyard will span 50 kilometers of tunnels – some as wide as suburban streets and taller than a double-decker bus. A total of 3,250 copper canisters containing about 6,500 tons of spent uranium will be buried here and hopefully left alone until the radiation has decreased by 100,000 per year.
According to Johanna Hansen, the project’s research and development coordinator, the place will be “glacial-proof”. “In a thousand years, there will be no sign that we were ever here. In 10,000 years, we won’t even know what language we speak. So this has to be a safe and definitive archive,” he says.
Nuclear power provides a clean and abundant source of energy, but comes with a toxic legacy. High-level waste from spent fuel contains radioactivity which has remained dangerous to humans for millennia.
It’s a growing problem: about 263,000 tons spent nuclear fuel currently sitting in interim storage, according to International Atomic Energy Agency estimates.
A common solution is to fill swimming pool-sized areas with waste and cover. Some countries, including France, recycle uranium to make new fuel and byproducts. Both are expensive. The Most of the UK’s waste is stored in Cumbria’s underground storage facilities, which incur annual decommissioning costs of £3 billion a year..
With Onkalo, Finland decides to bury the problem – literally. And requests for consultation from Spain, Germany and Canada, to name a few, suggest others will follow.
“It is possible that countries with smaller amounts of waste form common final disposal facilities,” says Hansen. “But eventually everyone has to do something. Sure, it can be recycled, but at the end of the day it’s still waste, just in a different form.”
Nuclear power currently accounts for approximately 26 percent of Finland’s energy. The opening of the third nuclear reactor at the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant will increase energy production to up to 1,600 megawatts, which produces a third of Finland’s electricity, in accordance with the ambitious climate goals. Finland is committed to coming carbon neutral by 2035, and Helsinki has pledged to exceed this target by another five years – closing the only remaining coal plant by 2024, half a decade ahead of schedule.
The expansion of nuclear production is central to this change. But Russia’s energy crisis has added urgency. Until March of this year, 30 percent of Finland’s energy was imported from Russia. Electricity supplies were interrupted on May 14 and natural gas imports stopped a week later. This has left Finland with a 20 percent energy deficit, which is partially filled by importing coal from Australia and South Africa.
It is disappointing, but a temporary fix – one that is necessary due to the unreliability of wind and solar power, says Suomen Energia CEO Jukka Leskelä. “Finland is practically an island – its Nordic borders are arctic and its common border with Russia is now tightly closed,” he says. “It’s an understatement to say that we have to find new ways to become self-sufficient. Nuclear power is a realistic solution.”
According to Helen Oy, Helsinki’s largest energy supplier, the city’s energy security is over 99.99 percent, but at the same time citizens have been warned about possible power outages this winter.
For Finns who largely support nuclear power expansion (60 per cent compared to 38% in the UK), Olkiluoto’s new online production facilities can’t come soon enough. On the day of the visit, a live interactive display shows that the site’s three reactors already use 36 percent of the city of Helsinki; When the new reactor is fully operational, it will be the most powerful in Europe.
Safety and security are top concerns for obvious reasons; entering the place is no different from visiting a maximum security prison. The new reactor is built with enough steel to withstand the weight of a jumbo jet falling on its roof, and terrorist threats are taken into account in the security planning – although the facility does not comment further on the matter.
Getting the public on their side requires openness about the use of nuclear power for and against, says Pasi Tuohimaa, director of communications at Olkiluoto. “You have to be brave enough to tell people the bad things—the things that don’t work so well—as well as the things that do,” he says.
“Nuclear strategies have never failed because of security problems, but always because of poor communication. It is easy to take the subject to the political mill, and people are easily led by emotions in politics. But now in the United States we are asking the same questions as we were in Finland 30 years ago,” he concludes.