MANY MINDEDFinland's regulator says the world's first nuclear waste repository is safe to operate
Finland's radiation and nuclear safety authority, STUK, announced on August 4 that Posiva's encapsulation plant and final disposal facility at Olkiluoto meets the safety requirements set in the Nuclear Energy Act and Decree, and that there is no obstacle to granting it an operating licence. Posiva applied on 30 December 2021. This is the world's first industrial-scale final disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel.
The facility sits roughly 430 metres underground in bedrock. The safety case rests on a series of nested barriers rather than any single one: a sealed iron-copper canister, a bentonite clay buffer around it, swellable clay backfill in the tunnels, engineered seals on tunnels and other spaces, and the surrounding rock. It will serve TVO's Olkiluoto plant and Fortum's Loviisa plant, under a licence proposed to run to the end of 2070.
The significance for ENERGY is not the megawatts, because there are none. It is that the most-cited unsolved problem in nuclear power — what to do with the waste, permanently — now has an answer that a national regulator has examined and validated. Every argument about nuclear's role in cheap clean generation has been conducted partly in the shadow of that unanswered question. It is no longer entirely unanswered.
The remaining steps are real. The Finnish government makes the final licensing decision, with a ministry proposal expected in the autumn, and STUK must run a commissioning inspection before operations begin. Cleared by the regulator is not the same as licensed and running.
Source: World Nuclear News