Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB (SKB) is Sweden’s radioactive waste management company. SKB has just submitted an application to the Radiation Safety Authority, (SSM) to extend the existing Final Repository for Short-lived Radioactive Waste (SFR) at Fosmark. Fosmark is located on the east coast of Sweden. The company has plans to expand the repository to almost three times its current size so that it can receive demolition waste from decommissioned Swedish commercial nuclear power plants.
The SKB application includes the preliminary safety analysis report (PSAR). This is a report on safety during the construction phase, system descriptions and a decommissioning plan. SKB cannot begin work to excavate rock for the extension of the SFR until SSM has approved.
Jenny Brandefelt is the project leader. She said, “The analyses are now updated with refined methods, data and calculations, while the conclusion from previous analyses remains firm: the plant is safe both during operation and after closure. It certainly feels satisfying that the updated analyses continue to show a safe facility in both the short and long-term”.
The SFR repository is situated almost two hundred feet below the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It began operations in 1988. The facility contains four five hundred- and sixty-five-foot rock vaults. It also contains a chamber cut into the bedrock with a one hundred- and sixty-five-foot concrete silo to hold the most radioactive waste. Two parallel access tunnels that are three thousand two hundred and eighty feet long provide access from the facility to the surface. The facility currently has a total final disposal capacity of about eighty-two thousand cubic yards.
Most of the short-lived waste deposited in the SFR was produced from Swedish nuclear power plants. However, radioactive waste from hospitals, veterinary medicine, research and industry are also stored in the repository.
SKB applied in December of 2014 for permission to triple the size of the repository to about twenty-three thousand five hundred cubic yards. The application was submitted to the government by the Land and Environment Court and the SSM in November of 2019. In April of 2021, the extension was approved by the municipality of Östhammar, where the repository is located. The matter was referred back to SSM and the Court following a government decision in December of 2021 to approve the extension.
SKB received an environmental permit from the Land and Environment Court for the extension in December of 2022. That permit regulates noise and transport among other things.
The plan for the extended repository will include six new rock vaults. The new vaults will be up to nine hundred feet long. The extension will be constructed at a depth of up to four hundred and sixty feet. It will be level with the current lowest part of the SFR repository.
The SFR expansion is expected to require six years to complete. In the first phase, earthworks, water treatment plants, and other infrastructure will be put in place. In the second phase, tunnelling work in the rock underground will be carried out.