By John Stang
A California nuclear waste disposal startup on Wednesday successfully inserted a narrow canister through 2,000 feet of vertical shaft to deposit it in a horizontal tunnel — and then later retrieved the same small container.
Deep Isolation, a 2-year-old firm from Berkeley, demonstrated its prototype canister at an undisclosed commercial oil and gas testing facility near Austin, Texas. “Location wasn’t a factor for the results we needed as this demonstration was a test of the equipment, not geology,” company spokeswoman Zann Aeck said by email.
The demonstration canister held a nonradioactive steel rod. It was lowered down an existing drill hole, after which a small “tractor” pushed it into place in a horizontal storage space. The same device was then used to bring the canister back to the surface after several hours.
Deep Isolation’s business model is to use directional drilling to create boreholes through which containers of radioactive material can he placed far underground. Among the declared benefits of its approach, the waste could be left within stable geologic formations isolated from groundwater.
“We have not invented new drilling technology; the oil and gas industry has already perfected directional drilling. What we are doing is using this technology for an unexpected and extremely important new application,” Deep Isolation Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Richard Muller said in a press release.
The United States alone has about 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel now stranded at nuclear power plants around the country. The Department of Energy is nearly 21 years past its congressionally mandated deadline to begin removing that material from its point of generation. While two corporate teams are pursuing federal licenses to consolidate the spent fuel for temporary storage, the federal government is not close to building a permanent repository.
The global stockpile of spent fuel is about 400,000 metric tons, according to the Deep Isolation press release.
Deep Isolation plans to take fuel assemblies from reactors and put them in 14-foot long canisters that are nine 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.
About 60 observers from several nations viewed the demonstration Wednesday, along with Department of Energy officials, investors, environmentalists, and representatives from the nuclear, gas and oil industries watched the demonstration, according to Deep Isolation. The company declined to identify them.
In a press release, the company said it is looking for potential customers in the United States and abroad. It did not discuss details.
“We are looking at the United States as well as countries in Europe and Asia. Nations with smaller inventories of waste may find that horizontal drillhole disposal is especially cost effective,” Aeck wrote.
In another announcement this week, Deep Isolation said it has raised a little more than $10 million in a “seed round” of funding from roughly 30 investors, who include environmentalists, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs. Another round of funding is planned for this year.
