3.09.2004

The nuclear industry likes to refer to Finland as a country what has solved the question of what to do with the spent nuclear fuel. This of course sounds amazing to anybody who knows that the high level nuclear waste has to be isolated from living nature for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years. Just to make a comparison – the last mammoths died “only” five thousand years ago.

So do Finns now have a solution of how to isolate the dangerous material from the living nature for thousands and thousands of years? Not really. What Finland has, is a plan, a municipality willing to take the waste and a political decision that approves the plan in principle. However, there are no final decisions yet, not to mention scientific proofs that the plan would work. The political decision only gives the nuclear waste company Posiva the permission to make further site-specific research in the chosen location, Olkiluoto.

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