Concerns Linger for 2020 Nuclear Dump Opening

The entrance to Finland's nuclear waste storage site looks somehow familiar, like the entrance to any underground parking lot at a bank or a mall.

It is located just around a curve in a sloping road. There are concrete retaining walls on both sides, and construction is still going on. But there will be no hourly tickets here – only permanent parking for about one million pounds of nuclear waste. In the dark inside, Timo Seppälä says this wide tunnel will eventually branch into scores of smaller ones.

"It's like a comb," he says.

The Set-Up

Seppälä is with Posiva Oy, a company created by Finland's nuclear energy providers to deal with the problem of waste. He says each small tunnel — the teeth of that comb — will house dozens of huge iron and copper canisters. Each canister is five yards long, one yard around and weighs 20 tons, not to mention it is full of highly radioactive-spent fuel. The canisters are to be the first of several barriers keeping the dangerous waste in place.

"There is bentonite clay surrounding the canister," Seppälä says. "It functions as a buffer."

No one has done this before and much is still being researched – the exact structure of the bedrock, how to manufacture the canisters, the design of the truck to bring them in, etc.

"The largest challenge is, of course, that we are doing a business that has a time scale of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years," says Eero Patrakka, Posiva's CEO.

The site is due to open in 2020 and will likely be full 100 years later. Nevertheless, the waste inside will remain dangerous much longer, so the company must try to design a dump that can survive many possible geological changes.
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