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Finland Could Be the First Country in the World to Bury Nuclear Waste Permanently
In March, Finland successfully completed the first test of its encapsulation plant, which, if finished, will become the world’s first permanent underground storage facility for radioactive waste.
In mid-March, five test containers, filled with nonradioactive materials, were sealed in a special aboveground facility before being transported underground and stored along a 70-meter-long subterranean tunnel, to provide an initial proof of concept for Onkalo’s storage process. Together with his colleagues, Jinshan Pan, a professor of corrosion science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, published a study in January 2023 devoted to the risk of sulfides in groundwater corroding the copper used for spent nuclear fuel containers. Construction could start within the next decade and would continue until the 2080s, with this repository’s underground space gradually extending—provided an appeal made by the Office for Nuclear Waste Review, a Swedish NGO, does not slow or halt the work.
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