Finnish waste management company Posiva has awarded a contract to YIT, the country's largest construction firm, for the second phase of excavation works at the Onkalo repository near Olkiluoto. The contract - worth about EUR17 million (USD19 million) - covers the excavation of two more central tunnels and five deposition tunnels connected to them.

Commissioning of the EPR at Olkiluoto in Finland has been delayed again, this time by six months to July 2020, utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj said yesterday. The new date was given in an updated schedule for the OL3 EPR unit from the plant supplier Areva-Siemens Consortium.

Finnish waste management company Posiva today announced the start of construction of the used fuel encapsulation plant at the Olkiluoto site in western Finland. Installation of the necessary systems within the underground disposal chambers is also set to begin soon.

Nuclear fuel will not be loaded into the core of the first-of-a-kind EPR at Olkiluoto until at least the end of August, Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj said today. Under the previous schedule, fuel loading had been due to take place this month.

There are "no radiation safety-related obstacles" for granting multi-metal company Terrafame a permit to recover uranium as a by-product from its Sotkamo mine, the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority has told the government. The government will now make the final decision on whether to issue the permit.

Finland will be carbon-neutral by 2035 under a plan announced by the country's new coalition government. Nuclear power will continue to provide Finland with low-carbon energy under the plan.

Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj is to employ liquid absorbers featuring bitumen in order to eliminate vibrations in the pressuriser surge line of the first-of-a-kind EPR at Olkiluoto. Suppressing the vibrations is one of the issues TVO must resolve before the regulator will allow fuel loading to proceed.

The full-scale in situ system test at the Onkalo underground characterisation facility near Olkiluoto has proceeded to the concreting phase in the construction of the end plug for the deposition tunnel, Finnish waste management company Posiva has announced.

Finnish power companies are looking for ways to streamline licensing and qualification processes through a new project started last year called KELPO. The first part of the project has been completed and it is moving ahead to the pilot phase, writes Tuomo Huttunen, senior advisor on nuclear power at industry group Finnish Energy.

The Finnish government today granted utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj an operating licence for the first-of-a-kind EPR at Olkiluoto. Once it enters commercial operation early next year, the 1600 MWe pressurised water reactor will supply some 15% of the country's electricity demand.

The first eight Westinghouse Triton11 fuel assemblies have been delivered to Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oy's Olkiluoto plant. The new assemblies will be loaded into Olkiluoto 2 during the unit's upcoming outage.

Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority yesterday informed the government it sees no reason why an operating licence for the first-of-a-kind EPR at Olkiluoto should not be granted to utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj.