Henry Fountain reports that beneath a forested patch of land on the Gulf of Bothnia, at the bottom of a steep tunnel that winds for three miles through granite bedrock, Finland is getting ready to store its nuclear waste. If all goes well, sometime early in the next decade the first of what will be nearly 3,000 sealed copper canisters, each up to 17 feet long and containing about two tons of spent reactor fuel from Finland nuclear power industry, will be lowered into a vertical borehole in a side tunnel about 1,400 feet underground. As more canisters are stored, the holes and tunnels, up to 20 miles of them, will be packed with clay and eventually abandoned if the material is not needed in the future.
The fuel, which contains plutonium and other products of nuclear fission, will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, time enough for a new ice age and other epochal events. But between the two-inch-thick copper, the clay and the surrounding ancient granite, officials say, there should be no risk of contamination to future generations. The repository, called Onkalo and estimated to cost about 3.5 billion euros (currently about $3.9 billion) over the century or so that it will take to fill it, will be the world first permanent storage site for commercial reactor fuel. With the support of the local municipality and the national government, the project has progressed relatively smoothly for years.
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