In a billion-year-old bedrock, 100 stories below ground level, Finns have found what the whole world is looking for: a place to bury their most dangerous nuclear waste.  From the US to the UK, Germany and Japan, plans to dig tombs for the highly radioactive fuel rods have hit political roadblocks or faced backlash from locals who don’t want toxic waste in their backyards. Finland, meanwhile, has been quietly breaking ground.

On this Baltic Sea island off the Finnish coast, the country’s two main nuclear power companies have just begun digging the main chambers of a tunnel system they aim to complete by 2020 to safely house 6,500 tons of spent uranium for the next 100,000 years.