Nuclear Energy Insight

July 2009—Disposal of America’s used nuclear fuel at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain may be controversial, but in Sweden communities have been competing for the opportunity to host a repository for that country’s used fuel.

Forsmark, north of Stockholm, beat out a competing site in the Oskarshamn region to become the location for Sweden’s permanent disposal site for uranium fuel.

Around 80 percent of people in both communities favored hosting the used fuel repository—both have operating reactors and other nuclear facilities nearby.

Sweden’s nuclear fuel and waste management company, SKB, needs a license to begin building the underground facility. Site preparation could start by 2013, with full construction starting in 2015 and operation by 2023.

The facility would hold all of the used nuclear fuel from the 10 commercial reactors that provide about 45 percent of Sweden's electricity, and from two that were recently shut down.

The repository is designed to isolate the fuel for 100,000 years, until radiation levels return to that of natural uranium. Under the system design, fuel assemblies are to be packed in cast iron baskets within thick copper canisters and packed in clay about 1,600 feet underground in a solid section of granite.

SKB says that at that level, groundwater movement is so slow that the radioactive byproducts could never affect life at the surface.

The method was selected in 1983, and was also chosen by neighboring Finland.

Forsmark hosts a three-reactor nuclear power plant and a repository for low-level radioactive waste.

SKB CEO Claes Thegerström said that the rock strata beneath Forsmark are drier and less fractured than at Laxemar, which influenced the final decision.

“The bedrock has spoken,” he said. All used fuel will be canistered at a specialized facility at Oskarshamn and then transported by sea to Forsmark in a dedicated ship.

—Read more articles in Nuclear Energy Insight and Insight Web Extra.