Nuclear waste management startup Deep Isolation intends to seal its first contract before the end of 2019, executives said recently.
The deal is likely to be significantly more limited in scope than the Berkeley, Calif.-based company’s ultimate goal of drilling deep holes for storage or disposal of radioactive waste, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Muller and Chief Operating Officer Rod Baltzer told RadWaste Monitor.
That could involve a feasibility study for a specific location or country, focusing on issues including the waste inventory, geology, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory environment, Baltzer said. Deep Isolation would provide the customer with a report on its findings, which could put it on the path for a larger contract covering actual disposal.
Details of the discussions can’t yet be made public, according to Muller.
“We have projected first contract in hand in 2019. I think we’re still on target for that. What it’s going to be, we’re pursuing multiple opportunities with clients, we’re not sure which one’s going to come through first,” she said during a June 26 telephone interview. “I think initially we’re looking at something that’s a little more bite-sized.”
Further projects over the next couple years could involve additional waste disposal demonstrations or some site characterization, Muller added.
Deep Isolation has lived on seed funding since being established in 2016 by Muller, a former policy adviser to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and her father, Richard Muller, a University of California, Berkeley, physics professor who is now the company’s chief technology officer. After completing a $10 million funding round by January, it is about two-thirds through a follow-up round to raise $6 million.
What the company offers is a patented method for directional drilling to place an 18-inch hole deep into stable rock, with the vertical hole eventually turning horizontal for insertion and permanent disposal or temporary storage of waste canisters. Deep Isolation says its approach would be half as expensive as a mined repository and could be completed in years instead of decades. Drilling near the current location of waste now stored above-ground could eliminate the need for long-distance rail transport.
Roughly 450,000 metric tons of nuclear waste globally is awaiting disposal, according to Deep Isolation. About 100,000 metric tons of that is in the United States, primarily used reactor fuel stranded at nuclear power plants.
The Department of Energy has made halting progress in carrying out its congressional directive to build a permanent repository for used fuel and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. Long-planned geologic disposal under Yucca Mountain, Nev., remains hotly contested and unlicensed. Meanwhile, two corporate teams are seeking federal licenses for interim storage sites for spent fuel. Baltzer’s former employer, Waste Control Specialists, is partnering in one of those projects.
Deep Isolation believes it can get a piece of this waste market – though not alone.
“I think we’ve always had the vision that we want to take maximum advantage of existing capabilities” in operations such as nuclear materials handling and drilling, Muller said. “So really it’s more bringing together the right pieces.”
Along with providing the intellectual property – four patents and counting – and methodology, the company would manage projects on the ground.
Muller and Baltzer spoke months after the company conducted its first waste canister disposal demonstration, last January in Texas, and days after Deep Isolation announced an agreement with Department of Energy contracor Bechtel to cooperate on future waste projects.
The specifics of that work will come into focus in talks over the next couple months, Baltzer said. An industry source said that, along with Bechtel, Deep Isolation has made presentations to other major players in the federal and commercial nuclear complexes. The source specifically cited Fluor and AECOM.
The Bechtel announcement drew both attention and skepticism to Deep Isolation’s business model.
“If you thought politics and public perception was a problem for Yucca Mountain, just wait till you see these folks try to sell states on #NuclearFracking,” Jordan Haverly, spokesman for Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), tweeted on June 24.
Shimkus is perhaps the lead voice in the House of Representatives for finally licensing and building the Yucca Mountain repository.
Haverly subsequently noted that the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended in 1987, allows only for one nuclear waste repository – Yucca Mountain. Congress would have to authorize, and appropriate funds, for a second location. In recent years it has been unwilling to even spend money on the Nevada disposal site, in the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to resume licensing frozen nearly a decade ago by the Obama White House.
The 1982 legislation also prevents the Energy Department from moving spent nuclear fuel to a “monitored retrievable storage” site absent authorization, Haverly said by email. “So whether your new borehole is temporary or permanent, it’s hard to envision it getting filled without some action by Congress.”
Like other proposed nuclear waste sites, a Deep Isolation project could run into opposition, the industry source said. Local opposition could particularly develop if the area over the waste storage is declared an exclusion zone for any other types of development. On its website, Deep Isolation says the horizontal segment of a disposal facility could extend 2 miles. “I just don’t think it’s feasible,” the source said. “I think when people start considering that, you get opposition.”
The industry source also questioned whether the containers used in the Deep Isolation system could meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s requirements. Generally, for licensing, a cask must be shown to be able to survive a 9-meter free drop onto a flat, hard surface. That is based on the expectation that the container would never be lifted above 9 meters, according to the source. Deep Isolation’s technology, meanwhile, involves sending canisters thousands of feet underground.
Muller acknowledged the legal difficulties inherent in trying to move into the spent fuel management space. Deep Isolation has been studying the market for defense waste, which represents somewhere around 20% of the total stranded U.S. waste stockpile As management reads it, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act does not require that defense waste go into Yucca Mountain.
“It’s something we take very seriously. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act is the law for nuclear waste disposal in the United States,” she said. “It’s the reason that we’ve been looking at defense waste streams, which is more of a gray zone. It’s also the reason we’re thinking about creative solutions in the United States. It’s not applicable outside of the United States, so some of the challenges that we’re facing in the U.S. are more easily addressed outside of the United States.”
In the meantime, management has made outreach to local government bodies and other stakeholders a central components of its early operations with an eye toward siting facilities.
“Part of our offers is for that community to make the decision and have a choice. Right now they don’t have a choice of what to do with it. It is stuck in storage above ground,” said Baltzer, who spent 14 years at Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, including more than two as president and CEO, prior to its sale in January 2018 to private equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co.
