How to bury radioactive waste

February 19, 2026·26 min·2 clips

Finland is burying nuclear waste deep underground to keep it safe for 100,000 years—how can we warn future civilizations not to dig it up?

The question is simple. Nuclear power can run around the clock without adding to the greenhouse-gas problem, but its waste stays radioactive long after the electricity is made. So far, storage has mostly meant pools or special containers near nuclear plants, safe enough, but temporary. Finland is trying something more final. Victoria Gill goes below ground to visit a facility designed to be sealed off from people. The trip down is quick and physical: a lift drops the group about 400 metres into bedrock, ears pop, and the temperature changes. Then it gets practical. Guides drive the visitors through a technical area, then walk them into the first final deposition tunnel. The rock is the point. Fiona McEvoy explains that the rocks across Sweden and Finland are among Europe's oldest, and the local bedrock is about 1.9 billion years old. It is completely unweathered, which matters more here than scenery ever could. Underground, the place feels less like one room and more like a long industrial promise. Gill asks everyone to stop talking, and the bedrock gives back a kind of quiet that is hard to imagine above ground. The work has barely started. About 10 kilometres of tunnelling is done, with about 40 more planned as waste arrives over the next 100 years. More than 3,000 canisters are expected. That turns the waste problem from an abstraction into something you can drive through.

As heard by us

An underground look at the long job of keeping nuclear waste out of harm's way.

BBC Inside Science turns its attention to nuclear energy's downside, radioactive waste, and it does so with a steady, measured focus. Marnie Chesterton and Victoria Gill take listeners underground in Finland, down a lift to bedrock 400 metres below, where silence and scale carry…

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For when you want the nuclear waste problem taken seriously, 400 metres down.

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