What Lies Beneath

Buried deep under an island in the Baltic, the world’s first permanent nuclear-waste repository is nearing completion. If all goes according to plan, future generations may not know it’s there.

- Andrew Curry

In 1980, a 29-year-old Finnish geologist named Timo Äikäs accepted a huge responsibility: He joined a team in charge of finding a way to permanently store his country’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste. Doing so would require Äikäs and his colleagues to think far, far into the future. They would need to build something to last as long as the spent fuel from nuclear-power plants remains dangerous—between 100,000 and 1 million years. Considering that the pyramids are a mere 4,500 years old, this is an essentially unimaginable span.

When Äikäs began working on the project, repositories were already on the drawing boards in the United States, Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere. The Finns figured that other countries would do the early research and development, and Finland could copy their best ideas. Indeed, the plan Äikäs and his team settled on was borrowed from Sweden, which sits on the same slab of bedrock that Finland does.

Almost 40 years later, Finland is the only country in the world that has a permanent nuclear-waste repository under construction. The projects Äikäs had assumed would be completed long before Finland’s have faltered on NIMBY politics. (Around the world, an estimated 250,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored in temporary facilities that are showing their age, and accidents are surprisingly common; several have occurred at U.S. facilities in the past few years alone. Accidents risk exposing people and the environment to radiation, and cleanup costs can run into the billions of dollars.) “Our original strategy— to follow others— has failed,” Äikäs says. Nevertheless, the facility he spent his career planning, known as Onkalo—which means “cave” or “hiding place” in Finnish— is on the verge of completion.