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

Germany: Nuclear waste train nears journey's end - by Frederic Happe

A shipment of radioactive waste was nearing its final destination in Germany Monday on a five-day odyssey from France marred by sometimes violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

The train with 11 containers of nuclear waste arrived in the northern town of Dannenberg shortly after 0400 GMT after running a gauntlet of protesters trying to block its progress along the 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) route.

The authorities were unloading the waste on to trucks for its final 20-kilometre leg by road to a storage facility in Gorleben, a former salt mine, a process likely to take several hours.

Note EU-Digest: German police temporarily detained 1,300 protesters who blocked a train carrying nuclear waste on Sunday. On Sunday, protesters staged a sit-in on the tracks near Dannenberg, 12 miles away from the train’s final destination. Some people fastened themselves to the rails.About 150 people, mostly demonstrators, were injured in scuffles with police, according to German  security forces. The nuclear waste was coming from France. The german Government had prviously agreed to ban all nuclear plants on its territory by 2022.

For more: AFP: Nuclear waste train nears journey's end

Belfast Telegraph: 'Dirty timebomb' ticking in Russian nuclear dump threatens Europe - Rachel Shields

For the complete report from the Belfasttelegraph.co.uk click on this link

'Dirty timebomb' ticking in Russian nuclear dump threatens Europe - Rachel Shields

20,000 discarded uranium fuel rods stored in the Arctic Circle are corroding. The possible result? Detonation of a massive radioactive bomb experts say could rival the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. A decaying Russian nuclear dump inside the Arctic Circle is threatening to catch fire or explode, turning it into a "dirty bomb" that could impact the whole of northern Europe, including the British Isles. Experts predict that a major explosion at Andreeva Bay could destroy all life in a 32-mile radius, including Murmansk and a sliver of Norway, whose border is only 28 miles away. But a much wider area of Norway, north-west Russia and Finland would be rendered uninhabitable for at least 20 years, and huge quantities of radioactive material would be dumped into the Barents Sea. "In the best case a small, limited explosion in just one of the stored rods could lead to radioactive contamination in a 5km radius," Aleksandr Nikitin, a Russian former submarine officer and nuclear safety inspector turned environmental activist, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. "In the worst case, such a single explosion could cause the entire tank facility to explode. We have no calculations for what that could lead to."

Mr Nikitin, whose work for Bellona led to continuing treason charges in Russia, added: "We are sitting on a powder keg with a burning fuse, and we can only guess about the length of the fuse." Nils Bohmer, nuclear physicist and head of Bellona's Russian division, told the newspaper: "It will at least, at a careful estimate, hit northern Europe. There are enormous amounts of radioactivity stored in these tanks."