It reads like a science fiction book: On a tiny island off Finland’s coast, robot tractors work deep underground to move the nation’s nuclear waste. But soon, in a world first, the gates of Onkalo will open.
On the tiny island of Olkiluoto on Finland’s Baltic Sea coast, just over three hours drive north-west from Helsinki, a minor miracle of engineering and science, planning and governance is unfolding.
A site would be selected by 2000, operations would begin by the mid-2020s. And so it was that a site was chosen by that date and Posiva, the company that won the contract to bury the waste, has just won a licence to start operations later this year.
By comparison, Australia’s targets are to reduce emissions by 43 per cent compared with 2005 levels by 2030, and reach zero in 2050. Partly this has to do with Finland’s typically pragmatic approach to policymaking, says Veikko Sajaniemi, a lead consultant with the Finnish sustainability advisers Third Rock.
But all this does not mean Finland’s nuclear path has been without difficulty or controversy, or that there is universal support for expanding it further.This takes us back to the island of Olkiluoto, where the government approved the construction of the so-called Olkiluoto 3 reactor on the same site as two older reactors in 2005, expecting it to begin delivering power in 2009.
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