In just a few years, workers plan to entomb high-level nuclear waste at Onkalo, a repository on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto that is meant to store spent fuel rods for 100,000 years. LongReads
After passing through a security gate, the van descends into a tunnel that burrows under the forests of Olkiluoto, an island off Finland’s west coast. The wheels crunch on crushed stone as a gray, wet October day gives way to darkness. “Welcome to Onkalo,” deadpans Antti Mustonen, a geologist here. Onkalo—“cavity” or “pit” in Finnish—will be the world’s first permanent disposal site for high-level nuclear waste, and a triumph for Finland.
The emissions-free electricity comes with a downside: hot and highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods. In Finland, the rods cool for decades in pools of water; other nations park them in concrete and steel “dry storage” casks. Either way, surface storage is vulnerable to accidents, leaks, or neglect during the thousands of years the waste remains dangerous, says Budhi Sagar, a nuclear expert formerly at the Southwest Research Institute.
But experts say the success of Onkalo also reflects unique cultural and political conditions in Finland: high trust in institutions, community engagement, a lack of state-level power centers, and a balance of power between industry and stakeholders. “If you tried to implement the same thing in a country with much lower levels of trust, it would probably fail,” says Matti Kojo, a political science researcher at Tampere University in Finland.
Although decidedly nonporous, these rocks can still contain cracks, and Posiva had to map and avoid them as workers dug deeper. “It’s these fractures which control the movement of water,” says Neil Chapman, a geologist who has served as an independent consultant for Finland’s nuclear regulator, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority . If any significant fractures are discovered when drilling individual cask pits, he says, those holes won’t be used.
Those concerns nevertheless delayed plans for what would be the world’s second deep repository, near the Swedish coastal town of Forsmark. In 2018, Sweden’s Land and Environment Court called for SKB to provide more evidence that copper corrosion would not undermine long-term safety.
Finland’s 1987 Nuclear Energy Act set up a nuclear waste management fund, financed by the nuclear operators, which incentivizes companies to develop waste disposal solutions. It also insulates the process from politics. Isaacs notes how this differs starkly from the situation in the United States, where DOE—which answers to the White House—runs the waste disposal program.
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