Pete Ross

How has Finland got here before anybody else did?

All tunnels and shafts leading to it will be closed.

More than 400 metres beneath our feet is a network of tunnels and underground facilities spanning an area of about two square kilometres.

That will be the final destination for waste from Finland's two nuclear power plants.

I'd been expecting a long drive down the five kilometre corkscrew access tunnel.

Instead, we're taking the lift.

And I am very keen to press the minus 433 button.

I can feel my ears popping.

You can feel the temperature changing.

So here we are.

I was expecting it to feel a little bit more dramatic than it did.

You come down in a lift and it takes less than a minute to go down into bedrock 400 metres down.

So far, about 10 kilometres of tunnelling has been completed here.

But it's only the start.

The plan over the next 100 years is to keep digging as the site fills up with waste.

With about 40 kilometres of new tunnels planned, space for more than 3,000 canisters of nuclear fuel.

A tunnel dug 400 metres down in the rock.

There are holes dug in that tunnel.

The canisters are shielded in two layers of metal.

Then there's a layer of clay.