After more than 20 years of construction, the world’s first commercial permanent nuclear waste deep disposal site——Finland's Onkalo project will receive an operating license within a few months and be officially put into operation. This underground facility, buried deep in 1.9 billion-year-old bedrock, will become the first permanent resting place for nuclear waste in the history of human nuclear power.
Ankro is located on the island of Olkiluoto on the west coast of Finland. It is located next to three of Finland's five nuclear reactors and is sparsely populated, with the nearest town 15 kilometers away. The project officially started construction in 2004, with a total construction cost of 1 billion euros. All costs are borne by Finland's domestic nuclear power companies, which have been setting aside special reserves based on electricity revenue for decades.
The entire disposal site is built 430 meters underground. The tunnels are all dug into bedrock that is 1.9 billion years old. This bedrock has extremely strong geological stability and extremely low earthquake risk.. According to the design,Used nuclear fuel rods will first be sealed into special copper containers at an above-ground packaging plant. Then it is sent into the underground disposal tunnel by unmanned mechanical equipment. The container is fixed in the bedrock borehole, and the outer periphery is filled with water-absorbing bentonite as a buffer..
The entire facility has a designed total capacity of 6,500 tons, which is enough to accommodate the nuclear waste generated by all Finnish nuclear power plants during their entire operation cycle.The project is expected to continue operating until the 2120s, when all tunnels will be permanently sealed and no longer open to humans..
Since the commercialization of nuclear energy, the final destination of nuclear waste has always been a core problem for the global industry. According to 2022 data from the International Atomic Energy Agency,Since the 1950s, the world has produced nearly 400,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. Two-thirds of it is still in temporary storage, and only one-third has completed complex recycling and reprocessing.
Currently, there is no commercial permanent underground nuclear waste disposal site in operation in the world. A similar project in Sweden will only start construction in 2025 and is expected to be put into operation in the late 2030s. The project in France has not yet started and faces civil opposition.
While the project was launched, the controversy never stopped. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear energy safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said bluntly that deep geological disposal is still full of uncertainties. He said that there are no good options for nuclear waste disposal, and deep geological disposal is only the "least bad" among many bad options.The core hidden danger is that the copper cans encasing nuclear waste will eventually corrode, and the scientific community has not yet reached a unified conclusion on the corrosion rate.
According to the design, the copper tank needs to be held until the radioactivity of the nuclear waste decays to harmless levels. This process takes hundreds of thousands of years, and the risk will ultimately be borne by future generations tens of millions of years later. besides,There is also a problem that spans civilizations. The written history of mankind is only more than 5,000 years old. How to enable humans 10,000 years or more later to understand the danger warnings here has not yet been determined. The academic community has specially set up "nuclear semiotics" for this purpose to study warning systems that can span thousands of years.
The core of Finland's ability to take the lead in implementing the project stems from legislation in 1994. The bill of that year clearly required that nuclear waste generated in Finland must be permanently disposed of locally and exports were prohibited.
Finnish Environment Minister Sari Murtala said that Finland will adhere to the implementation of established decisions, which is different from many countries. She also mentioned that in the future, she would not rule out receiving nuclear waste from other countries on a small scale as permitted by international rules.