Finland to create facility to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100,000 years
Finland will commission the world’s first underground spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage facility Onkalo by 2026, where it will be stored for 100,000 years – as noted by Pasi Tuohimaa, who heads the communications department for Posiva, responsible for the construction of the project, TASS reports
“Having a solution for the final disposal of spent fuel was like the missing part of the sustainable lifecycle for nuclear energy. <...>. As part of the project, we are building a sealing plant and a storage facility for spent fuel. And this is not for a while, but forever,” Mr. Tuohimaa said in an interview with CNBC.
According to the TV channel, radioactive spent nuclear fuel will be placed in waterproof copper canisters, which will be buried in rocks to a depth of over 400m. The Onkalo project is based on the Swedish KBS-3 method, which consists in creating multi-level engineering structures that ensure the safety of the spent nuclear fuel storage even in the event of partial failure of individual structural elements.
“I don’t want to call it a miracle, but the fact that Finland has built a repository now and in the next year or two we’re going to be operating it and start the disposal process means that it wouldn’t be a bad way of framing it [such technologies] in the global context,” Professor of Radiochemistry at the University of Helsinki Gareth Low told the TV channel.
Finnish Minister of Climate and the Environment Kai Mykkänen added that the project could become ‘a model for the entire world’. He believes that this storage facility contributes to solving the problem of nuclear waste disposal and ‘in particular, will reduce the use of fossil electricity production in Asia and the US’.
The construction price of Onkalo is €500m. The Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) allowed Posiva to begin construction of the storage facility in late 2016. The company received a license for its construction from the Finnish authorities back in November 2015, but it was forbidden to start work, according to the accepted procedure, until the nuclear regulator checked how well the safety factors were taken into account in the project.
