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For decades, the U.S. government has been staring down a growing problem: It doesn’t have a permanent site to dispose of used nuclear fuel.
Finland, however, is about to be the first country that does.
Posiva Oy, a joint venture owned by two Finnish nuclear power companies, is on the cusp of officially starting operations at what is set to be the world’s first permanent underground disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. The Times reported on their plans in 2017.
Posiva has been working on the site, located on the country’s western coast, since 2004, and it hopes to begin permanent disposal in less than a year.
“We have a solution,” said Pasi Tuohimaa, Posiva’s communications manager. “Final disposal of the spent fuel, it has been the missing part of sustainable use of nuclear energy.”
Earlier this month, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over the federal government’s decision to approve a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Texas. The lawsuit underscored a touchy subject — plans to store nuclear waste deep under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the only permanent storage site in the United States allowed by federal law, have been stalled for years.
The World Nuclear Association estimates the amount of spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. at the moment would fill up only half of a football field. But, as demand for electricity has risen, the nuclear industry is going through something of a renaissance, with companies investing billions and planning to reopen shuttered plants in the U.S.
How Posiva’s storage plan works
The barriers to permanently storing nuclear waste aren’t as much technical as about planning and politics. Permanent nuclear waste storage facilities can take decades to study and build.
At its disposal site, Posiva has drilled an array of tunnels spanning a collective 10 kilometers, Tuohimaa said. The company’s plan is to insert the used fuel pellets into rods that are contained in iron and copper canisters. The containers are then stored hundreds of meters underground and surrounded by compressed bentonite, a type of clay that swells when it comes into contact with moisture and essentially tightens the area around the containers. The tunnels are then backfilled.
“The main thing is to isolate it safely,” Tuohimaa said.
Right now, spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. can be temporarily stored in special pools or in dry casks at nuclear-reactor sites, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It can also be stored at independent storage sites if authorized by the commission, which is one of the issues at the heart of the case that has made its way to the Supreme Court.
Storing it temporarily, however, has a hefty price tag. The federal government currently pays hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the spent fuel’s temporary storage.
Where permanent storage goes from here
In Finland, which gets more than 40 percent of its power from nuclear energy, Posiva is currently doing a trial run using fill-in elements.
Other countries are following in Finland’s footsteps. France, Sweden and Switzerland have selected sites for planned projects, and other projects have been proposed in China, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Britain and Japan, according to the World Nuclear Association.
And in the U.S., there has been talk of revisiting plans for the Yucca Mountain site. Last year, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle toyed with reconsidering the idea.
More Climate Fix news:
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Eighty-one percent of new power capacity additions last year came from solar.
Post-car cities in Europe: “European cities are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car,” The Washington Post writes. “They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to vehicles.”
The U.K.’s big cuts: Emissions in the United Kingdom fell 3.6 percent last year as coal use dropped to the lowest level since 1666, the year of the Great Fire, according to a Carbon Brief analysis.
Germany’s too: The country’s environmental agency said greenhouse gas emissions in Europe’s biggest economy fell by around 3.4 percent last year, Reuters reports.
Brazil’s bold plans: “Brazil plans to launch an ambitious $125 billion fund to protect tropical forests when it hosts the COP30 climate summit this November,” Bloomberg reports.
Last year, The Times reported on Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility, which would pay developing countries a fee for every hectare of forest they maintain. The idea has been hailed as a potential breakthrough in financing tropical forest preservation.
Nuclear commitments: Amazon, Google and Meta back tripling worldwide nuclear capacity by 2050, CNBC reports.