据石油设备网讯 路透社6月25日赫尔辛基报道，芬兰计划建造世界上第一个地下核废料处理工具，这一计划向前迈进了一步。本周二，该公司的建筑商Posiva宣布，将投资5亿欧元(约合5.6955亿美元)建设核废料掩埋设施。
Posiva由芬兰公用事业公司Fortum和Teollisuuden Voima所有，计划将废弃核燃料埋在距赫尔辛基西北约230公里的Olkiluoto岛上Onkalo基岩约400米(1312英尺)深处。
芬兰政府已经为Posiva需要处理高放射性废物的地上封装工厂和处置设施颁发了施工许可证，然后将其送往地下废物储存库。
Posiva总裁Janne Mokka在一份声明中说:“我们希望在不久的将来为最重要的作品授予合同。”他估计，这些设施可能在本世纪20年代中期投入使用。
在Posiva的处理过程中，废物将被装入密封的铜罐中，然后转移到隧道中，并进一步进入衬有膨润土缓冲液的沉积孔中。
芬兰并不是唯一一个试图解决核废料积累问题的国家。
国际原子能机构估计，目前全球约有14个国家拥有25万吨高放射性乏燃料储备。
绿色和平组织在今年早些时候的一份报告中警告称:“这些乏燃料中的大部分仍留在反应堆现场的冷却池中，这些冷却池缺乏深度防御，比如二级密封装置，很容易失去冷却，而且在很多情况下缺乏独立的备用电源。”
瑞典也有类似的将核废料深埋地下的计划，但由于环境法庭去年对其安全性提出质疑，该计划被推迟。
包括美国在内的其他国家也计划减少其不断增加的核废料的实际数量，但美国在内华达州尤卡山掩埋核废料的一项已有几十年历史的计划被当地的反对人士叫停。
薛珂 编译自 路透社
原文如下：
World's first underground nuclear waste storage moves forward in Finland
Finland's plan to establish the world's first underground nuclear waste disposal tool a step forward on Tuesday when its builder Posiva announced a 500-million-euro ($569.55 million) investment in facilities needed for nuclear waste burial.
Posiva, owned by Finnish utilities Fortum and Teollisuuden Voima, plans to bury used nuclear fuel around 400 metres (1,312 feet) deep in onkalo bedrock on Olkiluoto island, some 230 km northwest of Helsinki.
Finland's government has already granted a construction licence for the above-ground encapsulation plant and disposal facility Posiva needs to treat the highly radioactive waste before taking it to the underground waste repository.
"We expect to award contracts for the most significant works in the near future," Posiva President Janne Mokka said in a statement. He estimated the facilities could be operational by mid 2020s.
In Posiva's disposal process, the waste will be packed in sealed copper canisters before being transferred into tunnels and further into deposition holes lined with bentonite buffer.
Finland is not alone in trying to solve the problem of its accumulating nuclear waste.
The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that there is now a global stockpile of around a quarter of a million tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel in some 14 countries.
"The majority of this spent fuel remains in cooling pools at reactor sites that lack defence-in-depth such as secondary containment and are vulnerable to loss of cooling, and in many cases lack independent back-up power," Greenpeace warned in a report earlier this year.
Sweden has similar plans to store nuclear waste deep underground but the plan got postponed after an environmental court put its safety in question last year.
Other countries, including the United States have plans to reduce the physical volume of their mounting nuclear waste but a decades-old U.S. plan to bury waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain has been stopped by local opposition.
