"The radioactive waste question has bedeviled the energy sector and made nuclear power controversial, but the Finns have a plan to dispose of it for 100,000 years."
"OLKILUOTO ISLAND, Finland ― From the outside, it looks like any other modern Nordic building rising several stories from a cleared swath of pine forest on this quiet, rural island off this country’s verdant southwest coast.
But inside, hard-hatted workers are busy completing a feat of engineering that has never existed. It involves a robotic system and a basement network of switchbacking tunnels carved more than 1,300 feet into the Earth’s crust. Once finished, the project, called Onkalo, will turn the page to a new chapter of nuclear energy’s turbulent 80-year story and make history for the power plant just a two-minute drive down the road.
In a matter of months, the machines inside this boxy gray building will begin a weekly routine that will continue for a century: placing highly radioactive gray cuboid rods into copper cylinders the length of a Lincoln Town Car. From there, the canisters will travel roughly two hours underground to crypts meant to keep the spent-fuel rods undisturbed for millennia in bedrock that geologists say hasn’t shifted in almost 2 billion years. Sealed twice over in bentonite clay ― which expands when wet, preventing water from seeping in and corroding the capsules, and offers stability in case of an earthquake ― this site is meant to entomb nuclear waste for as close to eternity as any human endeavor can guarantee."
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