Onkalo in Finland is designed to store nuclear waste for ~100,000 years.
That’s longer than recorded history. Longer than most civilisations last.
The engineering is impressive.
But the deeper question is philosophical: how do we communicate danger across millennia?
Excellent short video from the IAEA:
https://youtu.be/1AJ4ipoTnA0?si=qJRwmt3WvjkOhUtx
If you follow #nuclear things, there are stories right now about how Finland is about to put the first nuclear fuel in “permanent" storage. They have been building the Onkalo site to put the spent fuel from their 6 nuclear reactors since 2004.
The key takeaway is that it is more than 80 years since we began generating spent nuclear fuel (the first was by the Manhattan Project to make the plutonium used in the nuclear attack on Nagasaki) and we still have not been able to put one spent fuel rod in "permanent" storage. Finnish waste is far below 1% of global spent nuclear fuel and it has taken this much to get the first rod underground.
Image is of me in a tunnel in Onkalo in 2016.
#Finland started pre-production testing in the #Onkalo deep geologic storage for spent #nuclear fuel.[^1] Onkalo is the first production-ready deep geologic repository in the world…
…but only if we account for nuclear fuel repositories, because many countries already had been running deep geologic storage sites other hazardous waste for decades. For example, #Germany has not one but two deep geologic repositories storing thousands of tons of arsenic, mercury and cyanide waste from chemical industry.[^2]
And nobody is freaking out about it or chaining themselves to the railways 😉
> In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.
#LindaPentzGunter #HotStoriesRadioactiveWorld #Finland #Onkalo ? #IntoEternity ?
José - Luis Gutiérrez Villanue
Minoru Saba
Jan Haverkamp
GRS
Bundestag First Said Kontext
Bo Jacobs
kravietz 🦇
bs2
Joachim 365 📯🚴💚🌻🐝🐘
Ben Roimola