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These tunnels are designed for 100,000 years

Tom Scott | October 17, 2025



Onkalo, on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, is planned to be the first geologic storage facility for high-level nuclear waste: eventually sealed for 100,000 years. I got to see inside.

Thanks to all the team from Olkiluoto, TVO and Posiva: you can find out more at http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/onkalo

Edited by Michelle Martin https://www.youtube.com/@OnTheCrux
Audio mix by Haerther Productions https://haerther.net

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 49 comments.

  1. @TomScottGo

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    There's some difficult audio in here, thanks to background noise – but as with all my videos, full English subtitles are available. Volunteer translations are currently on hold while YouTube sorts out a spam problem; hopefully they'll be back soon!

  5. @panibo

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    I think that's far down enough so that if the civilization has the capability of digging that deep they most likely also know about radiation.

  8. @Galaxy-o2e

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Remember this is not an urgent problem, Nuclear energy is extremely efficient and compared to millions of toxic waste from coal plants and scrapped solar panels a few tons of radioactive waste doesnt look so bad

  9. @tigerphid9677

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    This endless paranoia about nuclear waste is just 'green' hysteria. Want proof? Well, the United States dropped an atomic bomb directly on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. And two million people live in Hiroshima today.

  11. @sergarlantyrell7847

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    I would like to point out the ridiculousness of preventing long-term storage facilities like this just in case in 10,000 years:
    IF society collapses
    and IF people lose the ability to to read 21st century signage (but have the capability to dig that deep)
    and IF some people decide to dig 500m down
    and IF they come across one of these flasks and break it open,
    a couple of archeologists MIGHT die from radiation poisoning.

    Come on! That's an incredibly unlikely series of events! It's rediculous to let a fear of an incredibly unlikely series of events, that, in a worst case scenario might kill or injure a handful of people, to stop us from dealing with the waste NOW.

  17. @lizziebutdiff698

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Humans are probably the only intelligent species to go extinct because its not cost effective.

    They could easily just transport the waste into space and direct it at the sun.

  18. @ta_pegandofogo

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Imagine if society collapses, and many thousands years after, they find one of this by accident, and keep searching for "ancient secrets and treasures", not listening to the legends of "the curse", and then find a very glowing rock/dust, only to find that it kill and torture slowly not only them, but their future generations too?

  21. @seanhunt138

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Storing nuclear waste underground is stupid. We don't currently have containers that will last the minimum storage time for waste to become safe. Containers will require mantinence other wise they will leak creating an expensive dangerous mess. Better to store them in fully covered and contain above ground facilities which are cheaper to construct and allow container maintenance to be conducted. Also focus on developing technologies that produce lower volumes of waste product over a plants life cycle would help too.

  22. @Somerandom1922

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    2:19 – I know this is a super old video and Tom has likely already seen every possible criticism raised for it, but for my own peace of mind I have to say that dry cask nuclear storage is FAR more robust than a typical concrete building. The concrete formulation is different, and held to higher standards, the reinforcement is FAR greater, and crucially (I know Tom didn't imply this, but it's a common misconception) the contents aren't going to leak even IF the dry cask broke somehow. The high-level radioactive waste stored in dry casks isn't glowing green ooze, it's glass and concrete and slag from (intentionally) melted down nuclear fuel.

    In addition, nature has already been thoughtful enough to run an ultra-long term practical test of deep nuclear waste storage for us in the form of the Oklo natural reactor which produced roughly 100kw of thermal energy from semi-intermittent water-moderated nuclear reactions over the period of a few hundred thousand years. The fission products of which moved no more than a few centimeters in the intervening eon.

  23. @connorthompson66

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    To clarify, the famous report "Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" was not for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, it was for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

  24. @jacob_90s

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    My idea regarding the end is to have no mystery. Put out so much information that it's boring. Build concrete monuments that details what this facility is and how it works, and put it in multiple languages. Give so much information that it becomes boring.

    I still think that if we really want to think about long term solutions for nuclear waste, we need to look into placing nuclear waste into an area of the crust that is being subducted into the mantle. There are a lot more hurdles due to those locations being more earthquake prone area, but if we manage to overcome those, or at least mitigate them long enough, it should be the safer method. If nothing else, I think we should start looking into tests without nuclear waste.

    I do think that Onkalo is being handled as safely as we can possibly do it, but a 100,000 years is a lot of time for things to go wrong.

  28. @Keith_Mikell

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    hey tom i have a burial site by me that the gov is doing. they are being very shady and not telling us much at all. in fact i just had my drone up there and they are digging and unearthed waste. Id love for you to do a video on my area but i doubt youll come out. It's in the middle of nowhere in PA. look up shallow land disposal site pa on google. It's horrible how we are being treated.

  29. @ashakydd1

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    I have mixed feelings on nuclear power, but I do have a very clear attitude that no country should be allowed to create nuclear reactors unless they have systems put in place to PERMANENTLY store the unusable nuclear waste. The fact that the USA keeps building up larger and larger stores of improperly store nuclear waste is patentedly absurd and grossly wasteful.

  35. @5nowChain5

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    The curse of the pyramids may have been real. They have been utterly stripped of anything of value. They are or were a capital project. What for, unknown. The Arc of the Covenant was used or abused as a weapon. It might have been a power source. Until warring idiots opened it and got themselves killed by radiation poisoning. Survivors handing back damaged remains. Which were promptly buried and lost to obscurity.

  39. @iLLDiSS

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    "i doubt it."
    the answer to any part of the atomic debatte.
    and what i doubt the most is the fact that humanity is able enough to understand the danger of atomic waste in a 100k years.
    And "i doubt it" that you'd still find atomic power a good thing, if your family would have gone mutants while living on it.

  43. @raapija

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Btw, that third nuclear reactor is one of the most expensive building projects ever. The third reactor started to be built in 2005 and got operational only as recently as 2022, but still to this day is really janky and suffers from faulty/outdated parts. It's become such a huge joke here in Finland, we think it will never be fully finished.

  44. @torgranael

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    I look forward to that facility being the basis for a bunch of horror stories for years to come. I'd be surprised if there weren't already stories about unearthing legally-not-Balrogs that are actually allegories for the dangers of radioactive waste.

  45. @Medicinnov8r

    October 17, 2025 at 3:19 am

    Nuclear is pure demonic evil, it must be, how else would you explain something that will likely wipe this planet clean when the next ice age comes cuz all nuclear facilities will experience meltdowns and nuclear fires making this planet uninhabitable for millions of years? And right now we are in danger cuz our magnetosphere is almost nonexistent leaving us more vulnerable to solar activity. But worse than that our planet is also more vulnerable to heating from solar radiation, causing increased earthquakes and volcanic activity.
    LoveIsTheLight
    MuchPeacefulWarm4GivingHugsLoveNStrength2YouALL

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