Finland solved nuclear waste. America's still guessing.

Nearly 70 years after the first US nuclear plant went online, the country has no permanent waste repository. None. About 2,000 metric tons of high-level waste accumulate every year, sitting in temporary pools and concrete casks at reactor sites. That's not a plan.

Finland figured this out. The country started planning its Onkalo repository in the 1980s, picked a site in the early 2000s, and began testing the facility in 2026. Operations could start later this year. Geologist Tuomas Pere walks through disposal tunnels hundreds of meters underground on Olkiluoto Island, where waste gets sealed in concrete. Four decades of sustained political will made this possible. France took a different route, reprocessing fuel at its La Hague plant to create mixed oxide fuel. But reprocessing isn't a complete fix. The leftovers still need permanent storage, and France is now aiming for its own repository by 2035.

The US designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as its permanent waste site in 1987. Political opposition killed the project. Funding stopped in 2011 and nothing has happened since. Now tech companies are pouring money into nuclear to power AI data centers, and the waste question looms larger. Casey Crownhart, writing for MIT Technology Review, argues that these companies should also fund waste solutions. Some experts want the US to create a dedicated waste management organization, similar to what Finland, Canada, and France have done, rather than leaving it to the Department of Energy.

Private companies are trying different approaches. Deep Isolation, a startup, uses horizontal drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to bore narrow holes 2 to 3 miles deep into stable rock. The idea is to lower waste canisters far underground, away from populations and politics. The company demonstrated it can lower and retrieve a prototype canister in a Texas test borehole. It's modular and could bypass the local opposition that stopped Yucca Mountain. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a dozen other states, including data center hotspots Virginia and Georgia where Meta, Google, and Microsoft are building facilities. Finland started planning its repository 40 years ago. For everyone else, the best time to start was decades ago.