By John Stang
California-based radioactive waste disposal company Deep Isolation is increasing its focus on business opportunities in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
On Tuesday, executives conducted a webinar to introduce their company to potential clients in the “EMEA” region. A follow-up session is planned for June 16.
The online meetings are an opportunity for co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Richard Muller and other executives to outline Deep Isolation’s basic engineering and business concepts. They also answered questions submitted by participants, mostly on the scientific and engineering basics of the directional-drilling concept.
On May 4, Deep Isolation announced the expansion of its London office, now at three staffers, to focus on the EMEA business. The company also has one staffer in South Korea.
Established in 2016 in Berkeley, the company in 2019 began looking at global opportunities. It incorporated its London second headquarters in February.
Any leads on business prospects in the EMEA region are confidential, Chris Parker, joint managing partner for its European, African and Middle Eastern business, said during the webinar. He noted several nations in this region have only two to six reactors, which would make them prime clients for Deep Isolation, since a field of boreholes would be dramatically smaller and less expensive than a full-fledged used nuclear fuel repository.
According to the 2020 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, the following EMEA nations fit a one-to-six-reactor description: Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
“We cannot discuss any details of current engagements,” a spokesperson said by email in May. “Our solution can provide a number of small countries with a nuclear waste inventory a very cost effective and timely solution to their high level nuclear waste disposal needs.”
Deep Isolation’s business model is to use directional drilling to create boreholes through which containers of radioactive material can be placed far underground. Among the declared benefits of its approach, the waste could be left within stable geologic formations beneath any aquifers.
Management plans to take fuel assemblies from reactors and put them in 14-foot long canisters that are 9 to 13 inches in diameter. These would be inserted in vertical boreholes — 14 to 18 inches in diameter — that extend a couple thousand feet to a couple miles deep. Such a borehole would gradually curve to become a narrow horizontal tunnel that could possibly extend for 2 miles. After a horizontal section is filled with canisters, the vertical boreholes would be filled and sealed with rock, bentonite, and other materials.
Deep Isolation recently published a white paper for potential global clients on some of the firm’s own cost estimates of repositories versus the borehole approach. The calculations contend a full-fledged mine repository would cost $122.2 billion in 2020 dollars in the United States, $23.9 billion in the United Kingdom, $19.8 billion in Canada, and $6.2 billion in Sweden. Those ventures would take an average of 9.3 years to construct after getting green lights from regulators, plus 10 years for disposal, Deep Isolation said.
The company put together a scenario that involves one field of 20 boreholes serving two reactors and holding 4,200 spent fuel assemblies. That scenario posits a borehole operation ready to receive its first fuel six months after a regulatory green light. It would take 5 1/2 years to fill 20 boreholes, at a total projected cost of $856 million.
To date, Deep isolation has not announced any contracts for waste disposal.
But it has started picking up business. Deep Isolation announced its first non-government contract in April, to support a study headed by the Electric Power Research Institute on the feasibility of using nuclear fuel borehole disposal on-site at the properties of advanced nuclear reactors.
The company has lined up roughly $5 million in in-kind engineering and business help from Bechtel and NAC International. NAC International, the spent nuclear fuel storage and transportation provider, will produce canister technology for Deep Isolation. Bechtel, under a 2019 memorandum of understanding, will provide Deep Isolation with project management, business, and engineering support in exchange for later support on environmental remediation programs for the federal government.
