ONKALO: FINLAND´S UNDERGROUND MAZE TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE

By Gundhramns Hammer

May 8, 2013

Entrance to Onkalo underground nuclear waste repository, Finland. Source: Google imágenes

The alarm clock goes off in the morning. Once... Twice... Thrice...  and finally you mean and mad scream to the top of your lungs fuck off!! but still managed to reach out and push the off button down so hard that you almost smashed the poor thing.

You are so upset and about to blow up because you must get up and go to work. You leave one reality and enter another one, except that in your dreams you can at least twist off the head of your boss.  

Work... A sophisticated way of saying hunting. Or why not call it modern slavery, after all that is what it is.

At the bathroom, behaving like a zombie, you pick up the electric toothbrush, turn it on and start cleaning up your set of teeth that keep the dentist around the corner rich.

You have been doing this for the last 25 years and have never given any thought as to where the power to run your gadget comes from. Besides you could care less where this juice came from.

In a city with a million inhabitants, imagine all of them using electric toothbrushes year round. And to this add up all of the other gadgets that need this type of juice to run, plus the cars, cellular phones, computers.... the list goes on and on and soon it becomes a net within a net of nets. 

Lots of powered wires in the city and one branches off and hooks up into the guts of your house.

If your city is one of those where electricity is generated by nuclear plants, you already or at least should know that they produce tonnes of radioactive waste. 

And what do they do with it? The nuclear waste could end up in Somalia´s coast or somewhere in Africa, trafficked by obscures routes usually in the hands of the mafia. Or it could be used for weapons.

Some nuclear plants take the waste and put it in special containers and hide it in underground facilities, with a few or lots of barrels dump in the ocean here and there.

Do you remember the Chernobyl disaster? How about the recent Fukushima nuclear disaster? Nuclear waste is nasty stuff and last for thousands of years.  

Radioactivity cannot be seen but it surely kills. It is deadly crap!

Now is it worth having electricity from nuclear plants to run our stupid gadgets at home meanwhile we shit all over with radioactivity the environment? 

I tell you we humans are really damned crazy. We are totally insane!!

And you do not believe me, let us watch the following documentary (Video 1) which shows what Finland is doing to put away all of its nuclear waste. Finland is building an underground nuclear waste repository so huge that the Egyptian pyramids could fit in more than 20 times. It is called Onkalo (Finnish, hidden) and is supposed to last 100.000 years! And keep in mind that Onkalo is just one of the many mazes of tunnels that the Finnish Government is planning to build to store this radioactive shit. 

Are we not damned crazy?

Now let us get to it:

  

Source: The Video Project

View original 

The world's nuclear power plants have generated an estimated 300,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste that must be safely stored for 100,000 years or more. Every year, they generate another 12,000 metric tons of high-level waste.

Into Eternity is the first feature documentary to explore the mind-boggling scientific and philosophical questions long-term nuclear waste storage poses. 

Structured as a message to future generations, the film focuses on the Onkalo underground waste repository now under construction in Finland. Onkalo is a gigantic network of tunnels being carved out of bedrock that will start receiving Finland's nuclear waste in 2020. Once the repository is full, in about 100 years, it will be closed and hopefully remain sealed for at least 100,000 years.

Into Eternity takes viewers deep into the Onkalo facility as it is being constructed and asks Onkalo representatives, scientists, theologians and others to address fundamental but challenging questions.

How can our civilization know what the world will be like in 100,000 years? The first modern homo sapiens appeared about that long ago and no human structure has survived more than 5000 years. How can we anticipate climate and geologic changes that far in the future? What will life on our planet be like then? How do we warn distant generations of the deadly waste our civilization left behind? What languages or signs will they understand? How do we prevent them from thinking they have located the pyramids of our time or some other treasures?

With its stark, stylistic approach, Into Eternity not only raises questions about the possibility of long-term nuclear waste storage, but also invites reflection on the limits of science and human knowledge, along with our responsibility to future generations.

                                                        ENGLISH/BULGARIAN SUBTITLES

                                                                 Video 1.  Into Eternity.

References

Hamblin J. D. (2008). Poison the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. 311 p.

Ojovan M. I. & Lee W. E. (2005). An Introduction to Nuclear Waste Immobilisation. Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 315 p.