Onkalo: Finland's 100,000 Year Nuclear Tomb

this video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespaces the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business check out squarespace through the link in the description below more on them in a bit try and picture the oldest building you can maybe it's ireland's new grange maybe it's the pyramids at giza whatever it is i want you to take that image and try to really imagine how long it's been standing for the vast gulf of human life separating you from that building's creation many eons ago maybe you just managed to glimpse a fragment of that eternity to briefly sense the impossible time scales involved well try and hold on to that feeling while you can because today's geographics will make even that temporal chasm seem like the merest sidewalk crack out on the finnish island of old colorado sits aside with an existentially terrifying claim to fame known as onkalo it's destined to become the longest standing structure in human history a nuclear waste repository oncolo is intended to last a hundred thousand years nearly 25 times the length of time the pyramids have stood but how do you build something to last so long and what mind-bending challenges do such time scales create today geographics is peering into the strange sublime world of humanity's nuclear tomb if you were to fly a plane over the island of old colorado off the west coast of finland chances are you wouldn't notice anything interesting about it flat covered in pine trees and home to little beyond three power plants akugato is so outwardly boring that you could almost use it as the base unit for quantifying all other scales of dullness but look closer and you might discover that this island isn't quite so boring after all deep beneath the earth 450 meters down in the bedrock lies one of the most remarkable structures on the planet known as ankalo a finnish word that can be translated as cabin or hiding place it's the world's only repository for high-level nuclear waste once it finally begins operation it will be expected to house radioactive leftovers for 100 000 years to give you some idea of the time scale involved it's worth going backwards to see what life was like 100 millennia ago as we sat our time-winding machine you should note this journey might take a while even traveling back a year every second it'll take well over a day to arrive so make sure you're comfortable within a minute of pressing the on button you're zipped back past the 1960s past the moon landing the beatles free love within five minutes you've crossed the 300 year mark outside your window the nation of america has ceased to exist george washington has yet to be born and abraham lincoln looks as crazy futuristic as the president of 2161 would look to you at 10 minutes shakespeare is gone the americas have yet to welcome both christopher columbus and smallpox and europe's main sport is dying horribly of plague by the time an hour has passed you're back in the ancient world way before the founding of the roman republic finally around the 76th minute you passed the building of the great pyramid of giza and you still have over 26 more hours to go when you at last stepped out of your time machine a day later in 98 000 bc you'd find europe frozen in an ice age sparsely populated by neanderthals and herds of woolly mammoths everything every single thing you associate with human culture would still be uncountable millennia away from happening in other words a hundred thousand years is a ridiculously long time but for oncolo surviving that long is a necessity nuclear waste comes in three different levels low intermediate and high at the low end you have stuff like clothing that's been doused in radiation at the high end you have the actual spent fuel used in power plants for humans coming into contact with high level waste is about as healthy as snorting a line of anthrax we measure the effect of gamma rays on the human body and something called sieverts in a typical year you or i might receive a dose of two to three millisieverts and note the milli at the start of that unit like how a millimeter is way smaller than a meter well spent reactor fuel will douse your body with an entire non millisievert in less than an hour when that happens you can expect symptoms like your hair falling out vomiting and our favorite internal bleeding in the eyes within a few weeks you will be as dead as a norwegian parrot although the level of danger drops exponentially after just a thousand years it isn't until you hit the 100 thousand year mark that this kind of waste is safe for humans to handle hence ankarlo hence finland's need to build an eternal nuclear tomb but if you think storing this waste is as easy as just digging a hole and declaring mission complete well prepare yourself for a shock from here on out things are going to get tricky given that we've been using nuclear power since the 1950s you might assume that we have a good handle on how to dispose of its waste well you'd be wrong right now every single nuclear waste producing country on earth keeps that waste in interim storage facilities a fancy way of saying nobody has any idea what to do with it because this stuff stays dangerous for so long we have to assume it will outlast all our cultures and well that's a massive problem while it's certainly possible we'll become an intergalactic civilization with technology so advanced disposing of nuclear waste will be child's play it's also possible some major pandemic or eager maniacal world leader playing with the launch codes will send us back to the stone age that means we have a duty to future earth civilizations not just to leave piles of stuff lying around that can make the insides of your eyes bleed and we mean piles a century from now there will be an estimated 1.1 million tons that need disposing of this simple terrifying fact has been keeping scientists awake for decades since the 1960s all sorts of methods have been suggested for disposing of high-level waste from burying it under the ocean floor to blasting it into space but each keeps looping back to the same problem how can we guarantee it will remain secure for a length of time far longer than the oldest human civilizations especially since so far we haven't managed to keep it safe for the lifespan of your average parrot in 1967 germany decided to experiment with what's known as geological disposal with the assault mine and lower saxony running dry the government moved thousands of tons of radioactive waste in there sealed it up and hoped that they'd never have to think about it again by 2008 the site was an ecological disaster zone thanks to collapsing mine shafts and the decay of barrels holding the material the mine is now a toxic place it's thought the waste could potentially come into contact with groundwater in the future thereby poisoning it but the costs of cleaning up are so astronomical that it might be impossible that was just after 40 years in terms of our time machine analogy you'd have barely had time to press the on switch and check your phone before you'd passed those four decades still burying nuclear waste remains the favored long-term solution only now we're trying to bury it better at oncolo the goal is to store radioactive material behind so many barriers that it's impossible for it to seep out each deposit will be made inside a 25 ton cast iron canister itself contained inside a thick copper vat designed to stop corrosion which will then be placed in a chamber carved deep inside the bedrock each chamber will be filled with bentonite clay aka the stuff in kitty litter which will expand and absorb liquids and also cushion the canisters against any geological movements when carlo is full all 137 tunnels will be refilled and sealed off hopefully trapping the material forever below the ground in short ankalo is an attempt to do geological disposal rights to build something guaranteed to last 100 millennia but even if the site itself lasts how can we keep it safe from excavation by future civilizations well it's time to get into the most fascinating aspect of it all how to craft a warning that lasts beyond the limits of human imagination and if you want to craft something that can challenge the limits of human imagination then it's time to consider turning to today's sponsor squarespace two simple things one maybe you've got some idea for a business or a website that you wanna start or maybe a podcast a youtube channel something like that knocking around up there in your mind well two the only way to figure out whether it's worth doing is to get it out there into the world and of course this can be daunting because it's scary to go and pursue new things but knowing how to set up a website is not an excuse squarespace allows you to create a powerful website for whatever you're up to or sell something online yes set up a store or you want to do a podcast yes also available on squarespace or you want to do a youtube channel obviously you do the youtube channel on youtube but you're going to want a website to complement it it all starts on squarespace with a beautiful template you can customize to your heart's content or start from scratch or move over an existing domain it's all super easy squarespace also handles all of the websitey stuff like i said they do podcast doesn't do mailing lists social integrations it's all there like i say squarespace it removes the excuses to your dreams so just go get started plus there's 24 7 customer support i mean you're not going to get stuck it's really easy but just in case you do they are there to help go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go forward to squarespace.com and you'll save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or a domain let's get back to it [Music] in 1981 the u.s department of energy convened the nuclear science equivalent of the avengers known as the human interference task force the assembled scholars were tasked with warning the far future about the danger of nuclear waste to say they had their work cut out for them would be a little like saying the pope has a certain affinity for the jesus dude the most common symbol for radiation is the truffle that black dot with three blades coming off it yet surveys show only six percent of all humans understand what it means that's six percent now in a few hundred years it could be zero percent let alone in a hundred thousand years in fact almost any symbol you can think of runs the risk of being massively misunderstood when removed from its cultural context pictogram of a healthy human walking up to the radiation source then falling sick might be read backwards suggesting a magical healing device is inside even now many cultures such as the japanese read comics right to left to counter this the human interference task force decided to get creative the linguist thomas sebock suggested founding an atomic priesthood that could pass the knowledge of waste repositories down through the generations via myth and ritual not to be outdone francoise bastid and paolo fabri proposed genetically engineering cats to change color in the presence of radiation than instilling generations of youngsters with a fear of color-changing cats in other words they came up with ideas as awesome as they were totally useless still they weren't the only ones to try in 1991 the united states waste isolation pilot project or wipp took another crack at solving the problem they recommended the creation of a hostile or poisoned landscape one that would naturally make humans want to avoid it for example the entire ground might be covered in basalt creating a black dead land where nothing will grow all jagged spikes might burst through the earth at odd angles dotted with pictures of terrified human faces based on edward monks the scream yet this approach also comes with problems at the time of recording wipp's current plans involve using gigantic eight meter high granite columns to mark out the site followed by rooms buried at different layers explaining the dangers below but while it might seem logical that future humans would avoid such a place since when have humans ever been logical as the late great terry pratchett once wrote if you put a large switch in some cave somewhere with a sign on it saying end of the world switch please do not touch the paint wouldn't even have time to dry we can see this happening in the real world even over comparatively short time periods in japan tsunami stones are markers placed at flood water height that say things like high dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants remember the calamity of the great tsunamis do not build any homes below this point although they've been around for a thousand odd years most of the still extinct stones date from 1896 when a massive double tsunami killed 22 000. many of them were well known to townships that were wiped out in the catastrophic 2011 tsunami and yet they'd chosen to build below the stones if people can ignore such dire warnings in a little over a century how the hell can you make sure that anything stays relevant for a thousand times as long at england the answer they eventually came up with was you can't so why bother installing any warning at all [Music] in the u.s it's a legal obligation for high-level waste repositories to try and notify future generations of their contents but finland has no such restrictions hence the current plan there's not going to be a marker there's not going to be a sign there's no warning there from the past instead there will be just regular terrain no different from any other part of the island this isn't as crazy as it might seem one of the reasons the finns chose this island as we mentioned earlier is because it's unbelievably boring there are no sources of water no minerals to be mined no reason for any future humans to ever move there and start digging around and that dullness extends underground too in 1980 29 year old tima alcas was tasked with finding a long-term safe place for burying finland's nuclear waste as a geologist icast knew that the ground under our feet isn't always stable it moves its shifts often slowly but with enough power to break open any number of nuclear waste containers what seems like a safe storage place in 2020 can easily become a nightmare danger zone by 102 000 a.d but not okiloto island the rock under oculoato was formed 1.9 billion years ago and has remained stable ever since so you know how human time scales seem laughable against the length of time on carlo will last while the rock beneath ocoloto guffaws at even on carla's time scale if he jumps back in our time machine you need to travel backwards at the rate of one year per second for over 60 years to get back to the point when akulato was last geologically active but while icas would recognize the brilliance of oklahoma's stability it would take him two and a half decades to see construction begin first it took until 1983 for the finnish government to officially license the project then it was another six years before they passed a law forcing nuclear companies to put aside money for it it wasn't until 1993 rolled around that serious examination of candidate sites could begin and an additional seven years before this site was finally chosen finally in 2004 construction began on ancalo by that time ikers had been working on the project for 24 years he'd gone from youthful 29 year old wunderkind to a middle-aged 53 year old expert it might have taken less than half a minute in our time machine a joke compared to the time scales we're discussing today but for icas himself it represented an entire lifetime perhaps the craziest part is that back in 1980 icaz had fully expected there to be plenty of high-level waste repositories all over the world by the time the carlo began construction the official finished position had even been to wait and see how the german british and american repositories worked out and then steal the best bits for their own design but over that quarter century all the other projects had collapsed rendered politically toxic by locals picking up a storm about living near radioactive sludge only in finland alone where local communities were not only consulted but also given a veto over the project was workable to proceed ground was broken on the site in 2004 and with that the fate of akulioto island was sealed for the next hundred thousand years the process of creating carlo was a long and slow one excavations were done by drilling holes in the rock face filling it with explosives and then blasting chunks away at a time this was followed by dragging the waste rock away and washing the new walls sealing them with insulation and anchoring them with cement bolts and steel bars to stop the whole thing falling down it was a painfully time-consuming process explaining why the site still isn't finished even today the most recent estimate we could find is that things will be ready to start practice runs for handling nuclear waste in 2022 but it may be that the coronavirus has delayed things on that front still the project has already reached its maximum depth of 450 meters in 2015 the finnish government granted the license to start building the repository itself as in the tunnels where the waste will actually be stored once completed they will run in a tangle over 60 to 70 kilometers all condensed in an area around the size of the nation of monaco the plan is to finally start shipping in high-level waste death or disposal in 2024 once that begins carlo will run for the next hundred years by the time it ceases operations you be and every single person watching this will be dead teemo alkas will be a distant memory as far removed from the men and women working on his project as someone like jd rockefeller is from today but what will disposing of these spent fuel rods actually involve well the first thing to note is that one simply doesn't just remove a fuel rod and walk it into one carlo each piece of waste that ends up in the tomb will have spent several decades cooling in a pool at an interim storage facility where temperature and radiation levels will slowly decrease since these things come out at a staggering 800 degrees celsius this is a pretty important step when enough of these fuel rods are cooled they'll be bundled together and then placed inside cast iron canisters a meter wide these canisters in turn will be lowered into copper urns five centimeters thick and transported to a carlo there they will be placed in chambers carved from the bedrock and surrounded by bentonite clay once a tunnel has all its canisters it will be refilled with water absorbing clay blocks and sealed until all 137 tunnels are closed off by that time around the year 2125 3250 canisters containing 6500 tons of high-level waste will have been deposited the main entrance shaft to carlo will be filled with rubble and the complex will be sealed and then the fins will simply walk away walk away and wait for trees to grow over the site of the nuclear tomb and for the world to forget that it ever existed but it's at this point that the story gets really interesting as the poet robbie burns once wrote the best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew and while the plans for ankalo have certainly been well laid there are already major worries about what the future might bring take the thick copper canisters which the company in charge believes will last a hundred thousand years while a 2012 study by the royal institute of technology in stockholm concluded that a more realistic time frame might be a mere 1 000 years now that's still a long time machu picchu beijing's forbidden city and the entire nation of the usa are yet to last anywhere near that long but it's just a drop in the ocean compared to the 100 000 years that the waste will be dangerous for so what happens if the canisters degrade the fear is that water that leaks into the canisters will be transported back up to the surface full of dangerous radionuclides this could be potentially harmful for any future civilization that just happens to be living there although finland disputes the royal institute's findings far more likely is that the canisters could be ruptured by some force we have nowhere preparing against at some point in the next 50 000 or so years it's predicted a new ice age will grip the earth icy sheets many kilometers thick will come sweeping across the northern hemisphere burying europe beneath heavy glaciers while that makes it even more unlikely that anyone would accidentally stumble across enkolo the pressures on the bedrock would be unbelievable with kilometers of compressed ice weighing down on the tomb for uncountable millennia who knows what may happen to the chambers that the canisters lie in still those in charge at oncolo feel confident that even these geological disasters won't breach the tomb what teemo icas imagines happening instead is that the site is simply forgotten about and never again reopened it could be that when our sun finally becomes a red giant in the next five billion years extinguishing all remaining life on earth ricarlo remains undisturbed a strange relic from a nuclear age or distant descendants have no idea even existed but who can say for sure when dealing with the sorts of time scales that carlo exists on there's only one certainty that time will make fools of us all most every precaution we as a species can make for the next 100 years will be wrong let alone the next one thousand heck how many people just 10 years ago could have predicted things like donald trump being president looking to the future is hard well now try imagining looking 10 000 years into the future a mere tenth of the time carlo is meant to stand for try picturing a mesolithic hunter-gatherer in the europe of 9800 bc a guy living in a world before the bronze or iron ages before stonehenge or the pyramids before the first recognizable civilizations ever arose now try imagining that hunter-gatherer sitting down and predicting our time try and picture him envisaging the creation of nation-states of vehicles that can fly through the air of an invisible net that covers the entire planet bringing a bald man talking about history to the phone of someone living over 15 000 kilometers away can you do it no of course you can't and that impossible stretch of time is just 10 of encarlo's intended lifetime from the vantage point of our own minuscule cosmically insignificant lives then all we can really say is that carlo represents a hope a hope that something from our era will last so long and anchor to our own world and lives unchanging down the eons whether that's possible or whether that's a laughable dream is something none of us will live to find out because in the great book titled the history of the carla doom we haven't even started the first chapter we haven't even got off the first page all the twists and turns all the details are still to come and we can only guess what they might involve so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do smash that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe for brand new videos every single week also check out our fantastic sponsor squarespace there's a link to them below and thank you for watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 480,040

Rating: 4.866991 out of 5

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Id: gIWUm4hRCPE

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Gus_Smedstad]

Waste isn’t the problem. It’s everything else in a nuclear facility. Raw uranium, pellets, encased uranium, and fuel rods are all radioactive, and when they stack up an belts and in buffer containers, they hit max radiation quite quickly.

Since the fuel processing plant is going to be lethally radioactive anyway, you might as well store the waste there as well. “How” is just a big stack of industrial containers.

Frankly I hate it. You can’t build a nuclear power plant without creating a radioactive hellhole. I don’t think it’s solvable, since the game is fundamentally about moving things around on conveyor belts. As long as any product in the game is both radioactive and must be moved on belts, that’s what’s going to happen.

[u/thealmightyzfactor]

I have an array of industrial storage containers hanging off the north edge of the world. Should last me several hundred hours of full load nuclear power - though it'll really last about 6x that at my current power consumption rates.

Pretty sure they'll add nuclear reprocessing at some point, but big storage arrays should last until then.

[u/RisingHalcyon]

By being very creative. I've seen multiple people who have shot a conveyor belt to the sky in a makeshift floating fortress. Or a bunker underwater, under the map. But the best answer is always somewhere on the map where it won't be a problem for you in the future.

[u/Probably_Not_Evil]

I say we send it up the space elevator and let FICSIT launch it into the sun.