Thoughts on the Helsinki Workshop

I was at a project workshop in Helsinki, Finland. The main attraction of Helsinki is nature. The workshop venue is on an island about 20 minutes bus ride from Helsinki city centre. The project is on predicting how water flows behave in complicated underground environments over a very long period of time. The purpose of these predictions are for understanding what can happen if radioactive wastes are stored underground for a very long time.

The kind of radioactive wastes they are looking at are the “high level wastes”. They are “High level” because they are very radioactive and they get very hot, and they usually come from spent fuel from nuclear power plants. After various treatments, these wastes become hot, radioactive glass rods, stored in steel containers. These containers are then placed in underground tunnels forever. Water movement underground features heavily in the planning, despite the waste is locked in waterproof glass, sealed in steel canisters, stored in waterproof tunnels. “Forever” in this context means this is designed for couple of million years, and they wanted to know what would happen to the radioactive stuff after all those measures are breached. The host nation for the workshop gave a talk on the repository that will be constructed next year in Olkiluoto, which will be used to store wastes for the next one hundred years, before locked away for the next million. What got my attention is that the program is passed via an act of parliament, where it finally sink in to me that really a lot of it is a political issue. But how could it be? Hardly any governments are in power for centuries. I meant to watch a documentary film based on this storage facility before I write this, but I'll save that for a later post.

I remembered when hearing about the funding was cut for the Yucca Mountain (in Nevada) radioactive waste storage research project this year. Research there has been ongoing for decades, and the decision for the change in funding mainly coincide with the election: why should Nevada be responsible for wastes from the East Coast?

It does bother me a bit how these storage sites are chosen are based on a lot on political, rather than geological boundaries, and that the engineers/scientists designed them for all sorts of natural disasters and scenarios, but they are most likely get dug up by the next government.