The Olkiluoto nuclear power plant has just started its reactor OL3, which should be connected to the network at the end of the month. It is also on this peninsula, 270 kilometers from the capital Helsinki, that Finland will store its nuclear waste. It will thus become the first country to opt for their final disposal. The Swedish daily Today’s News visited the premises.
Olkiluoto, Finland. Four fingernail-sized pellets of uranium are enough to generate enough electricity to heat an average-sized house for a year. But this colossal energy comes at a price – and that’s why Jonas Leino is building a dedicated enclosure for it. When it is operational, no one will have the right to enter it. “The walls, roof and floor are made of concrete 1.30 meters thick. Above, there will be the control room, from where we will guide the robots”, he explains.
Jonas Leino is the representative of Skanska, (the Swedish construction company) which is building an encapsulation plant here for Posiva, the Finnish radioactive waste management company, in Olkiluoto, just over three hours from road northwest of Helsinki.
This is where the high-level spent fuel will be encased in cast iron and sealed in huge copper pipes five centimeters thick, five meters long and one meter in diameter. The cylinders will be conveyed to 500 meters of depth by means of an elevator, in the primitive rock, for a duration of at least one hundred thousand years.
Sealed for eternity
Five kilometers of a sloping road [parcourus dans un long tunnel], and we arrive. There’s a smell of rock dust and dynamite in the air. It must be said that the drilling and drilling are going well. In four years, the site will be able to accommodate the first cylinders. Jyrki Liimatainen, one of Posiva’s geologists, points to a gallery shrouded in darkness:
By this summer, we will have completed the drilling of five such tunnels, 300 meters long, and we can begin to calculate precisely the number of holes we will need and where to drill them in the tunnels..”
These tunnels will eventually be around a hundred, arranged in a fishbone pattern on a horizontal plane. Each will be pierced with vertical holes in which remote-controlled machines will deposit the copper cylinders. When a tunnel is full, at the rate of regarding thirty cylinders per tunnel, it will be filled with bentonite. In a hundred years, the site will reach capacity and will be sealed for eternity.
Finland is the first country in the world to organize the final disposal of its high-level spent fuel, the Achilles’ heel of nuclear energy everywhere in the world. The Swedish method is called KBS-3. The Swedish radioactive waste management company, SKB, applied for permission to use it in Sweden in 2011 for a disposal site in Forsmark,
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Hans Strandberg
Source
Founded in 1864, it is the great liberal morning daily. Its page 6 is famous for major current affairs debates. “Les Nouvelles du Jour” belongs to the Bonnier Group, the largest publisher and owner of newspapers in Sweden. the
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