Right now, all of Canada's high-level nuclear waste is sitting at the reactors where it was produced. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is responsible for figuring out what to do with this radioactive garbage. They want to bury it underground, and they're considering seven possible host communities for the planned vault, all in Ontario.

While that process chugs slowly ahead—they're hoping to have a site selected by 2023, and it could begin accepting used fuel about 20 years later—scientists are modelling the future.

As part of this, the NWMO partnered with similar agencies that deal with radioactive waste in Sweden and Finland, two other nuclear-powered countries, on the Greenland Analogue Project. It uses the Greenland ice sheet as a stand-in for the next Ice Age, to inform their planning for a long-lasting nuclear dump. According to the NWMO, the Greenland ice sheet is comparable to the kinds of ice sheets that could cover both Canada and Scandinavia again in the far future.

"What we're trying to understand is, in the future, when there's two or three kilometers of ice over where we're sitting now, what the impact will be," explained Monique Hobbs, a geoscientist with NWMO, in a phone interview. "We're looking for a place to store used nuclear fuel passively for over one million years, at depths of about 500 meters."

Using hot, pressurized water, scientists drilled 23 boreholes down through the Greenland ice sheet to the rock below, Hobbs told me. Some were up to 700 meters deep. Three more were drilled into the bedrock next to the ice sheet—one with a depth of 649 meters below ground surface. It was drilled on an incline, extending right under the ice sheet.