Finland will soon do what no one else has been able to do

Hats off to Eurajoki! On Tuesday, the Swedish Radiation Protection Agency (Stuk) finally gave a positive safety statement to the nuclear waste disposal company Posivan to the application for the use permit of the encapsulation and final disposal facility.

Stuk’s positive statement was a prerequisite for the Government to grant the actual operating permit. This will happen already in early autumn or at the latest during the end of the year.

Finland is now the first in the world to really solve how the generated nuclear waste is disposed of in the soil – or in Onkalo – nowhere else has it gone this far.

Posiva’s goal is to reach readiness to start the final investment by the end of the year.

10,000 years is a small eternity

Of course, the radiation safety center’s operating permit statement has been delayed. Originally, Posiva submitted an application for a license to the Ministry of Labor and Economy already in 2021, and the processing was supposed to take a couple of years.

The schedule has been moved due to further research – and right on the topic. However, the goal is to keep the radioactive substances underground in Posiva’s disposal facility for as long as possible.

The most important are the first 10,000 years, which in the human life cycle means an immeasurably long time and in the geological history of the Earth a short spurt.

Alongside this goal, delays in the operating permit are secondary problems.

In any case, the know-how born from more than 40 years of research into the final disposal of nuclear waste is worth its weight in gold compared to the situation in many other countries.

Posiva’s export fist with Posiva Solutions there is an almost limitless market for selling Finnish know-how. That alone is a business worth billions of euros.

The scale is well given by the fact that those coming to Onkalo of TVO Olkiluoton and Fortum’s The amount of nuclear waste from the Loviisa nuclear power plants would be around 6,500 tons in total, when the last batch of waste is taken to the cavity after about a hundred years.

New waste awaits resolution

Currently, around 11,000 tons of new nuclear waste is generated in the world per year. There are 450,000 tons of waste stored waiting for the final solution. So the market is huge.

The new nuclear energy law approved in the summer gives this business a little extra spice, even though Finland still prohibits the final disposal of other countries’ nuclear waste.

However, with the permission of the Government, processing and temporary storage of foreign nuclear waste in Finland would be possible, which could improve the economic utilization of the encapsulation facility in the future – without forgetting safety, however.