How to build a nuclear tomb to last millennia
Nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that will keep it safely buried for millennia?
It is a chilly day early in the summer. But 1,500ft (450m) beneath the rolling hills of the Champagne region in northeastern France, it feels much warmer.
This facility's fluorescent lights are bright, and the air is dry. I can taste the dust in the atmosphere. The heavy emergency respirators I have to lug with me are a reminder of the dangers I might face this far underground.
Then I start to become disorientated by the rough, criss-crossing rocky passages of the underground laboratory, the hum of hidden electronic equipment and the lack of people. How do I get back to the lift?
I turn a corner, and there in front of me is a huge chamber, so large that I think for a moment that I have stumbled into a tomb of the pharaohs. But it hasn't been built by the Ancient Egyptians. It was instead carved out of the rock as a burial place for some of the most radioactive substances on Earth: intermediate and high-level nuclear waste.
How do you go about designing, building and operating structures that take decades to plan and even longer to build, that operate over centuries and must survive for 100,000 years, and that contain some of the most dangerous materials on the planet?
