A European country has built the world’s first permanent storage site for spent nuclear fuel, which humans are about to be banned from visiting for a whopping 100,000 years.
Thanks to climate change, technology, and evolution, what the world will look like in 100,000 years is unknown—mankind may even have permanently left Earth by then.
But if we stick around, we’ll finally be able to enter the underground tunnel in Finland, where humans will be unable to go for about 4,000 generations.
Over the next few years, the country will begin depositing spent nuclear fuel underground in Onkalo.
Finland will start burying the highly radioactive waste in the next two to three years near the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in the municipality of Eurajoki on the west coast of Finland.
The highly radioactive waste will be buried deep in the bedrock at Onkalo after being encased in cast-iron and copper cylinders and wrapped in bentonite clay.
Although it may sound terrifying, the nation has plaudits from around the globe, claiming Finland to be a model for the world’s sustainable nuclear energy storage.
“A tour at Onkalo, which lies 450m (1,480ft) below the ground, to see tunnels hewn in the living rock to store highly radioactive waste for 100,000 years, suddenly makes me nervous,” writes BBC journalist Erika Benke, who was offered a walk around the tomb.
Benke added: “I’m alone in a dark tunnel where spent nuclear fuel will decay for millennia. I’m standing at a spot where, starting from 2025, no human should set foot for 100,000 years.
“It brings home so clearly how brief our lives are. I fleetingly contemplate how minuscule a part of 100,000 years my own life is.”
Nuclear waste canisters will be lowered from a lift to a landing area further down to a deposition tunnel, where robotic vehicles will pick them up and take them to vertical deposition holes—their final resting places.
