What Lies Beneath

Buried deep under an island in the Baltic, the world’s first permanent nuclear-waste repository is nearing completion. If all goes according to plan, future generations may not know it’s there.

- Andrew Curry

In 1980, a 29-year-old Finnish geologist named Timo Äikäs accepted a huge responsibility: He joined a team in charge of finding a way to permanently store his country’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste. Doing so would require Äikäs and his colleagues to think far, far into the future. They would need to build something to last as long as the spent fuel from nuclear-power plants remains dangerous—between 100,000 and 1 million years. Considering that the pyramids are a mere 4,500 years old, this is an essentially unimaginable span.

When Äikäs began working on the project, repositories were already on the drawing boards in the United States, Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere. The Finns figured that other countries would do the early research and development, and Finland could copy their best ideas. Indeed, the plan Äikäs and his team settled on was borrowed from Sweden, which sits on the same slab of bedrock that Finland does.