“It looks just like wallpaper,” Jean-Pierre Simon says, pointing at the dark green line of trees that separate the fields, now glimmering in the setting sun. It is a landscape that he has admired for decades. “But soon, there will be a railway, and a train carrying nuclear waste on the horizon,” laments the farmer, his voice becoming bitter. His family has been living here, near Bure in the Meuse department of north-eastern France, for three generations. The question is, how many more generations will stay here to cultivate these fields in the future.

“Our goal is to reconcile the economy with our planet,” promised Ursula von der Leyen when she presented the adoption of the European Green Deal in 2019, shortly after she first assumed the presidency of the European Commission. Two years later, the European Parliament adopted the European Climate Law, which promised to turn the European Union climate-neutral by 2050. Another year later, in 2022, the European Parliament agreed to label both natural gas and nuclear power investments as climate-friendly sources of energy. In the latest European elections, held in June 2024, the centre-right European People’s Party, led by von der Leyen, again secured the majority of the seats.

But EU member states remain divided when it comes to investing in – and relying on – nuclear energy. On one hand, there’s France, which currently produces around 70 per cent of its electricity using nuclear power, and which recently passed a law to facilitate the construction of six (and up to 14) new reactors. In 2023, Finland’s first European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) in the country’s second nuclear power plant, Olkiluoto, started regular production; the country’s first nuclear power plant, Loviisa, began operating in 1977. And while some EU countries, like Poland, are planning to start building their first nuclear power plants in the coming years, others – like Germany – have opted out of nuclear energy production. The country’s last remaining nuclear power plants were closed in April 2023.

But it is not only the process of producing nuclear energy that sparks controversy, especially after the devastation caused by the accidents in Chernobyl (in Ukraine in 1986) and Fukushima (in Japan in 2011). Countries that have produced and relied on nuclear energy, like France, Germany and Finland, all face the same question: how to safely dispose of nuclear waste?

Finland: silenced detractors amid widespread support

Finland is considered one of the forerunners when it comes to nuclear energy. Roughly 20 years ago, the municipality of Eurajoki in western Finland not only accepted the erection of an EPR nuclear power generator but also the digging of Onkalo. Finnish for ‘cave’, it is a repository for spent nuclear fuel. It will become the first of its kind in the world at its opening, planned for 2025, after €900 million of construction costs. The overall cost is expected to reach €5 billion.

Run by the Finnish energy company Posiva Oy about 240 kilometres from Helsinki and situated 400 metres under the surface of the Earth, dug into the Finnish granite bedrock, Onkalo will become the final resting place for used nuclear fuel rods originating from the country’s five reactors: three on the island of Olkiluoto, right next door, and two in Loviisa in the south-east of the country.

The Onkalo project works according to the KBS-3 model, first developed in Sweden: spent fuel rods are inserted in copper cylinders, which offer the first barrier against the propagation of radioactive materials. The cylinders are then put in slots dug into granite. Finally, bentonite clay seals the copper capsules in their slots and fills in the deposition tunnels, and acts as a buffer between the copper and the granite.

A few kilometres away from Onkalo, in Eurajoki, lives Sirkka Saloma. She is 74 years old and saw the arrival of the nuclear industry in the region, back in the 1970s. “At first, there was strong opposition to the reactors, but it eventually disappeared”, she tells Equal Times.

One explanation lies in the massive financial support provided by the nuclear power plant operator, TVO, to the municipality of Eurajoki. In 2022, over a total of €57 million in tax revenues for the town, TVO would have paid €20 million in property taxes, according to Eurajoki’s mayor.

Sirkka supports the presence of TVO and the Onkalo, like most of the inhabitants of Eurajoki that Equal Times spoke to. Their trust could be considered as representative of the Finnish population nowadays. If acceptance of nuclear power was under 25 per cent back in 1983, it jumped to 61 per cent in 2024, according to a recent poll. And negative views decreased from 40 per cent to 9 per cent during the same time period.

But this does not mean that everyone agrees to the project.

We spoke to several residents – either historical opposition figures involved for decades in the protests against the construction of Onkalo or younger people, active until recently – who asked to remain anonymous. They all share a common trait: they feel that they have been silenced, either by unspoken ostracisation or by more explicit confrontations.

According to one person that we spoke to, after an initial phase more than ten years ago when opponents were more numerous, the local supporters of Onkalo started to apply pressure on detractors to ensure that the town won the project and benefited from it financially.

Some went as far as intimidating those against the plan, “sometimes walking under their windows with rifle guns”, as one person recalls. Another person we met had the feeling that because her opposition to the project was publicly known, she slowly lost her friends and had to search for work in other cities, further and further away from her hometown. She felt local employers would not want to hire her because of her opinions – although none explicitly gave this reason. Another opponent, after being involved in one of the marches organised against nuclear energy a few years ago, suffered from violent police repression and also decided to drop the fight, seeking refuge in a secluded property, far away from those painful memories.

On the other side of the Bothnia Gulf, work by researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, questions the durability of copper containers in the long term. To offer protection from any radiation, the capsules would have to hold the nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years. But in a study published in January 2023, the corrosion scientist Jinshan Pan and his team point out the risks regarding embrittlements, cracks and corrosion due to sulphides in groundwater and called for “a comprehensive understanding of the corrosion mechanism [...] to provide a solid scientific basis for the risk assessment of copper canisters in the final disposal of nuclear waste”. In a nutshell, he called for more studies on copper corrosion. The operator of Onkalo, Posiva, opposed these findings, arguing that sulphide levels are low enough to ignore this particular type of corrosion. It has not conducted any new research on the topic so far.

Germany’s nuclear phase-out

While Finland races ahead to be the first country to have a fully functioning spent nuclear fuel deposit, other countries like Germany seem to be far from even designing a location.
It all started on shaky ground in 1977, as a salt dome near Gorleben, right between Hamburg and Berlin, was designated to be the last resting place for spent nuclear fuel.
This decision sparked a massive opposition movement, which contributed to forming the ‘Anti-Atom-Bewegung’, the anti-nuclear-movement in Germany. Wolfgang Ehmke, spokesperson of the Bürgerinitiative Lüchow-Dannenberg, the anti-nuclear movement near Gorleben, is an activist of the first hour. To him, the nuclear phase-out in Germany is “not only due to our action, but also a series of lucky and unlucky events”.

After the Fukushima disaster, the German government pledged to opt-out of nuclear energy in 2011, although in 2013 it restarted the search for a future nuclear waste disposal site.

The first phase of the new search terminated in 2020 and stated de facto that Gorleben is not suited for such an infrastructure. Its geological characteristics did not meet the conditions which the future disposal site should respond to.

The location analysis is currently making slow but steady progress. In a recent interview with the local newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung, the president of the federal agency for nuclear wastes disposal (BGE), Iris Graffunder, explained that ten potential locations should be set for 2027. However, a final decision on the location will not be announced before 2046.

As for Gorleben, the federal agency for nuclear waste disposal announced its dismantlement last year. The salt that was dug out from the site for the construction and stored in a heap ever since, should be returned to the dome later this year. Observing every action and gesture of the agency, Bürgerinitiative Lüchow-Dannenberg remains critical concerning the date: “We are still waiting for the announced test run, before the final dismantlement,” explains Ehmke. Until then, its maintenance will have cost €20 million per year.

High tension over new waste repositories in France

Swallows fly in and out of Jean-Pierre’s barn, which provides shelter and shade on a hot June evening. JP, as everybody in Bure knows him, now armed with a rake, has been working since the early morning – like he does every day. A row of white and brown cows chew lazily on their hay. Only every now and then a low-pitched moo breaks the silence.

But Bure, in north-eastern France, about 300 km east of Paris, is far from quiet. The village, home to about 80 people, is the main stage of a political fight between the French state and anti-nuclear activists. Here, demonstrators have clashed with police on numerous occasions. In 2018, about 500 policemen were mobilised to evacuate protesters occupying a nearby forest. Even today, tensions are still palpable in Bure and the neighbouring villages. Police cars patrol the streets frequently, inhabitants denounce house searches and living under constant police supervision.

The reason? Bure’s underground is a construction site. France’s nuclear waste repository – named Cigéo for “industrial centre for geological deposit” – is supposed to store a total of 83,000m³ of high-level, long-life and medium-level nuclear waste. France produces around 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power.

The waste to be stored in Cigéo amounts to only 3 per cent of France’s waste, but 99 per cent of its radioactivity.

Some of the demonstrators who came to Bure to support the local protest decided to stay and revive the countryside with sustainable farming. Like Mila and Jan, who hoped to start a new chapter in their lives here, far from the clamour of the city. Their dream is to raise goats: “We would like to produce our own goat cheese, to have just enough for ourselves and perhaps sell or exchange with others,” says the young couple who until recently, lived in an old house in a village next to Bure. However, this summer, they were forced out by the prefecture. While local authorities invoked the apparently ‘unsanitary conditions’ of the habitation, Jan and Mila’s landlord is convinced that the mayor of the village simply doesn’t want anyone who opposes Andra, the French national agency for nuclear waste management, to settle in the municipality. Since last year, Andra embarked on an unprecedented large-scale appropriation programme to acquire the land needed to construct the deposit.

Despite the nuclear waste’s high radioactivity levels, Andra has offered assurances that the location in Bure is safe: Cigéo is being constructed within a layer of Callovo-Oxfordian clay, deposited on-site about 160 million years ago. The conditioning of the waste and the protective layer of clay rock will help to avoid radioactive dispersion, the agency says. The storage is designed to remain safe during its operation for 100 years, as well as after its closure, for another 100,000 years. The deep storage project should enter its pilot phase in 2035.

But whether generations-old farmers like JP, or newcomers like Jan and Mila, will be able to continue their lives here is a different question. Andra plans to acquire an additional 550 plots to continue with the construction of its mega-project. Cigéo was declared of public interest in 2022, so the company now has the right to expropriate landowners. “I am 64, it is time for me to retire,” says JP. “My son applied to take over the farm, but Cigéo also covets some of my land parcels,” he laments. The agency recently asked for an extra strip of land alongside the former railway that will become the transportation channel for incoming spent nuclear fuel, and this further threatens the viability of JP’s plots, which would become much harder to work – or sell – if Andra’s request is granted.

In the ongoing process, which has been taking its toll on the farmers and inhabitants of the area for the last 15 years, another, much less visible form of coercion is also taking place: in a leaked document produced by a Land Operations Engineer of Andra, consulted by Equal Times, farmers of the region are listed and labelled according to whether they have been or can be “managed”.

In January 2023, Andra submitted an application to the national nuclear security agency, IRSN (Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety), to authorise the construction of the final disposal in place of the current underground laboratory. After a reform of the nuclear security agency last year, and the termination of its previous president’s mandate, its new head was nominated in May 2024. And it is no less than the current president of Andra, Pierre-Marie Abadie, designated by President Emmanuel Macron. This choice raised doubts regarding the integrity of the entire project’s authorisation process, as critics pointed out conflict of interests.

“For now, we don’t see the bulldozers smashing the ground,” says JP. But he still remains sceptical: “I have doubts about my ability to stay here, should my farm be taken over. But I don’t have much time to reflect and think,” he says.

For now, JP must go back to work.