Finland's Crazy Plan to Make Nuclear Waste Disappear

The U.S. plan to bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain may be dead, but in Finland, engineers are going ahead with a plan to build an enormous bunker to house the dangerous stuff. And they have a radical solution to keep future civilizations away—hide the nuclear waste somewhere so unremarkable and unpleasant that nobody would ever think to go there.

the Finnish government later this year will begin the final licensing of the world's first permanent storage facility for high-level nuclear waste. Located on Olkiluoto Island, just off Finland's southwest coast, the underground facility known as Onkalo will hold all of the country's existing waste and all that it expects to produce over the next century. It is designed to keep that waste secure for at least 100,000 years—in part by making humans forget it was ever there.

Onkalo is intended to house high-level waste (HLW), the most worrisome byproduct of nuclear power. It consists of spent nuclear fuel and some of the fuel's decay products, and it can emit dangerous types and levels of radiation for tens of thousands of years. Roughly 300,000 tons of it now exists; about 12,000 more tons are produced annually, and both numbers will increase significantly in the coming decades. To date, most HLW has been stored in water-filled pools at the nuclear plants where it was produced, or in temporary offsite facilities where the waste is bound in borosilicate glass and cast into ingots, which are then sealed inside shielding metal canisters. But these are impermanent and unsatisfactory solutions. Pools require constant maintenance and refilling, and both they and temporary facilities are physically insecure.

And there is the problem of time. HLW will remain dangerous for longer than civilization itself has existed. Future civilizations may not even have the ability to address the dangers—even if we could somehow warn them what they're dealing with.

The only viable solution seems to be facilities like Onkalo—deep underground bunkers carved from impermeable rock, in geologically stable zones, where the waste can be redundantly sealed and then permanently buried. The U.S. attempt to build such a bunker at Nevada's Yucca Mountain fizzled in a fit of political bickering. But in Finland, Onkalo marches on, with a plan to keep humans out of there long after the entrance is sealed. 

Read more: Finland's Crazy Plan to Make Nuclear Waste Disappear - Popular Mechanics