Finland works with communities to bury nuclear reactor waste

Olkiluoto Island, Finland

BENEATH a forested patch of land on the Gulf of Bothnia, at the bottom of a steep tunnel that winds for 4.8 kilometres through granite bedrock, Finland is getting ready to entomb its nuclear waste.

If all goes well, some time early in the next decade, the first of what will be nearly 3,000 sealed copper canisters, each up to 5.2 metres long and containing about two tonnes of spent reactor fuel from Finland's nuclear power industry, will be lowered into a vertical borehole in a side tunnel about 426m underground. As more canisters are buried, the holes and tunnels - up to 32 km of them - will be packed with clay and eventually abandoned.

The fuel, which contains plutonium and other products of nuclear fission, will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years - time enough for a new Ice Age and other epochal events. But between the two-inch-thick copper, the clay and the surrounding ancient granite, officials say, there should be no risk of cont…