A key stage in the construction of an underground laboratory for nuclear waste has been completed in China

China has completed the construction of a spiral access tunnel at the Beishan Underground Research Laboratory, one of the world's largest facilities designed to study the safe disposal of radioactive waste. The laboratory is being created by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) in the Gobi Desert and will become a key element of the national nuclear materials management program. This was reported on December 27 by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) newspaper.

The Beishan Underground Laboratory is located near Jiuquan city in Gansu Province and is designed to develop technologies for long-term storage of radioactive waste. The completion of the complex spiral transport ramp was an important milestone in the project and allowed access to the deep levels of the future geological installation.

According to Wang Ju, CNNC's chief researcher and lead designer of the project, nuclear energy remains one of the most efficient and low-carbon energy sources. At the same time, the vast majority of radioactive waste — about 99% — is classified as low and medium-active and eventually decays to safe levels without the need for ultra-long-term isolation.

The greatest difficulty, as Wang Ju noted, is the management of highly radioactive waste, which accounts for about 1% of the total volume. Such materials require reliable insulation for hundreds of thousands of years. It is to solve this problem that the Beishan Laboratory is being created, which is conceived not only as a national, but also as an international research center for the exchange of experience and best practices.

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The laboratory is formed at a depth of about 560 m below the surface of the desert. Its architecture includes an extended spiral access tunnel with a length of approximately 6.9 km and a diameter of about 7 m, three vertical shafts and two horizontal levels. This configuration allows you to simulate the real conditions of a future geological storage facility. The construction was carried out in exceptionally hard granite rocks more than 250 million years old, which significantly complicated the work. Standard methods of sinking proved to be insufficiently effective and could violate the integrity of the array. Additional difficulties were created by the steep bends of the tunnel, which worked at the limit of the capabilities of drilling equipment.

To implement the project, the engineers used the Beishan No. 1 tunneling complex, a specialized Chinese—designed machine designed for drilling hard rocks and laying curved tunnels at great depths. The extreme conditions required special solutions in the field of safety and structural stability. It is expected that the further work of the Beishan Laboratory will allow China to accumulate critical data on the behavior of rocks, engineering barriers and radioactive materials in conditions of prolonged isolation, as well as contribute to global research in the field of nuclear safety.

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