The Waste Question

All the nuclear waste ever produced by US power plants is famously said to fit on a single football field, only a few meters deep. The volume is genuinely small. The real challenge is that some of it stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years, demanding storage solutions on geological timescales.

Finland's Onkalo repository — carved into 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock — is the world's first permanent nuclear waste solution, designed to isolate waste for 100,000 years. Advanced reactors could reprocess existing waste as fuel, reducing both volume and radioactivity duration.