Sweden started building a final storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on Wednesday, only the second such site in the world, where highly radioactive waste will be stored for 100,000 years.
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250116073617/https://www.arctictoday.com/sweden-starts-building-100000-year-storage-site-for-spent-nuclear-fuel/
Are 500 meters deep enough?
500m is the industry standard depth for deep geological repositories for nuclear waste
But is that enough? I rarely trust industry standards.
I mean, really the only thing that’s gonna expose them is plate tectonics. Just to give a sense of scale, America and Europe are diverging by 4 cm/yr, so will be 500 metres farther from each other, horizontally, in about 10,000 years. Geologically stable regions (called cratons) would not experience such motion vertically for much, much, much longer.