Deep Isolation said this week results from a recent demonstration of deep borehole disposal technology shows its viability for permanent disposal of waste created by fuel recycling.
The Berkeley, Calif.-based nuclear waste disposal technology developer completed a three-year project funded by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) under the Converting Used Nuclear Fuel Radioisotopes into Energy (CURIE) program. The CURIE program supports nuclear energy projects centered around fuel recycling technology.
Through this particular project, Deep Isolation said in a Tuesday press release it found that all disposal scenarios studied were “projected to cost less than the program’s target of 0.1 cent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.” It also said that the long-term safety results showed that “all scenarios under expected conditions met the study’s safety performance criteria, with projected public radiation doses in most scenarios analyzed orders of magnitude below the 10 millirem-per-year regulatory benchmark used in the analysis,” according to the release.
Deep Isolation completed the project in collaboration with Oklo, DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University. The company provided the waste disposal piece of the project, according to the release.
“This project shows the value of designing recycling and disposal systems together rather than treating waste management as a downstream consideration,” Jesse Sloane, Deep Isolation’s executive vice president of engineering, said.
The completion of the project comes at a time where DOE and several companies have taken interest in taking up fuel recycling as a way to strengthen the fuel supply chain. However, the economics and nonproliferation concerns clouds the feasibility of the technology.
Deep Isolation and Oklo have expressed interest in being private partners in DOE’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus initiative. Deep Isolation has previously worked with DOE on demonstrating its deep borehole technology, such as its Universal Canister System, for permanent disposal of waste.
In completing the three-year study, Deep Isolation said the results could help the industry navigate the most efficient approach to managing and storing waste from fuel recycling.
“Working alongside Argonne National Lab and Oklo, we developed a technically grounded disposal pathway that could support the economics of future fuel recycling while safely isolating the resulting waste,” Sloane said. “These findings give us another important building block toward an integrated and sustainable nuclear fuel cycle.”
When DOE initially selected five states for the nuclear campus program in July, prior to West Virginia’s additional selection in September, Rod Baltzer, Deep Isolation’s president and CEO, welcomed the idea of working with the states, DOE and others to help close the nuclear fuel cycle.
“As new reactors are deployed and domestic nuclear capabilities expand, it is imperative to also deliver safe, secure and permanent disposal of used nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste – and the Campus initiative rightly establishes that stewardship as the centerpiece of these vital new State-Federal partnerships,” Baltzer said in the company’s July 28 press release.
The company also said it is well suited to the campus model because of its “modularity, scalability and adaptability to a very wide range of geologic settings.”
Oklo, on the other hand, has expressed interest in multiple parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based nuclear company has plans on developing an integrated fuel approach that would recycle nuclear waste, fabricate those materials into fuel and load it into its advanced reactors.