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How Fracking Led To A Breakthrough In Underground Nuclear Waste Disposal

This article is more than 5 years old.

Deep Isolation

When Deep Isolation’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Elizabeth Muller thinks of boreholes, she isn’t thinking of natural gas or oil. She’s thinking of a great way to dispose of nuclear waste.

Deep Isolation is a recent start-up company from Berkeley by Muller and her father, Richard, that seeks to store nuclear waste safely at a much lower cost than existing strategies.

The technology takes advantage of recently developed drilling technologies to place nuclear waste in a series of two-mile-long tunnels, a mile below the Earth’s surface, where they’ll be surrounded by a very tight rock called shale. So tight that it took new technologies to get any oil or gas out of it at all.

But this new technology does not do any fracking, just uses the new drilling methods.

‘We’re using a technique that’s been made cheap over the last 20 years,’ says the elder Muller, who is also a physicist and climate change expert at UC Berkeley. ‘We could begin putting this waste underground right away.’

Once a Climate Change Skeptic, Richard’s work in Climate Change confirmed to him that climate change is real and caused by humans. In fact, like all leading climate scientists, the Mullers now argue that the world must increase its use of nuclear energy to slow climate change and understand that solving the nuclear waste problem would help.

Since paralysis has defined our nuclear waste disposal program for over ten years, this may be the time to discuss alternatives. Even though the U.S. House of Representatives just passed H.R. 3053, The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018, to reopen the Yucca Mountain Project, it seems dead in the Senate and is just way too expensive given that we picked the wrong rock in 1987.

Deep Borehole Disposal of nuclear waste is not new although Deep Isolation is the first to consider horizontal wells. We’ve been discussing deep boreholes for years, along with other strategies, like the generally accepted deep geologic disposal, or dropping the waste into an ocean trench or deep in the Antarctic Ice Sheet, transmuting the waste by bombardment with high energy particles, or even shooting it into the Sun (thought of but discarded pretty quickly).

Deep borehole disposal is one of the few strategies looked at by the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future that was formed to come up with a new strategy in the wake of Yucca Mountain’s closure. Their recommendations were basically to pick disposal options suited to the waste and the need. And to get everyone to consent to them before you start.

The key aspect of Deep Isolation’s strategy is the use of drilling technologies recently developed for very tight rock deposits. We have become so good at this that America now produces more fossil fuel (gas, oil and coal together) than any other nation.

There are single drill rigs that can drill a dozen stringers horizontally off in different directions, that can open up tight formations for miles, and that can even pick themselves up and walk to the next drill site.

So adapting this technology to nuclear waste may be pretty easy. The Mullers emphasize that they are keeping their drillholes simple.  ‘We are not doing anything experimental when it comes to the drilling’ says Elizabeth.  ‘We are using horizontal drilling methods that have been proven over the past few decades.’

For now, the Mullers are focused on disposing of commercial spent nuclear fuel, leaving the defense, or bomb, waste to DOE who correctly wants to put that in a separate repository.

Deep borehole disposal is simple. Drill a very deep hole – one or more miles - put the waste in it and fill it up with some special layers, but mainly crushed rock, asphalt and concrete. As geologists, we know how many millions of years it takes for anything to get up from that depth in the Earth’s crust.

Most previous discussion of deep borehole disposal only considered vertical holes. But it’s cheaper and easier to drill horizontal tunnels in shale. With advances in drilling technologies, the drill holes can fit 1-foot diameter, 14-foot long canisters, able to hold a single used nuclear fuel assembly. (See video)

‘Drilling the holes takes a couple weeks at most,’ says Elizabeth. Even better is that, unlike other strategies, no humans need to go underground.

The nice thing about horizontal drillhole disposal is that it almost doesn’t matter where you put it in the country. At that depth, with billions of tons of rock between the waste and the surface, you’re so deep in the crust that the overlying rocks don’t matter. The water table doesn’t matter. The climate doesn’t matter. Human activities don’t matter.

And we have lots and lots of shale.

Having many possible locations means the waste doesn’t have to travel that far, something the public seems to think is a major risk, further reducing costs.

The use of modern drilling technologies allows the tunnels, or drifts using a mining term, to go horizontal, even to have neat things like a plumber’s trap and to slant upward, making release even more unlikely (see figure).

America has only about 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel which would nearly cover a football field), so it wouldn’t require all that many holes, only about 300. And the Oil&Gas industry has already done most of the developmental work, having drilled over 50,000 such horizontal wells this deep or deeper since 2000.

There are hurdles to overcome before this technology can be adopted, especially convincing the public and their representatives that this is a good idea that they will accept in their state, and then getting a license for the disposal of nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But as deep borehole expert Dr. Ethan Bates points out, the most important roadblock to this Deep Isolation technology is not technical or regulatory - it is the fact that current federal law prohibits DOE from using privately-developed geologic disposal systems.

On the other hand, human laws are a lot easier to change than physical laws.

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