What Deep Isolation Is Doing Differently with Nuclear Waste

While managing spent fuel from current commercial reactors is a major concern for nuclear engineers today, one question remains about nuclear energy, SMRs, and next-gen reactors: where does spent fuel go long term? Rod Baltzer from Deep Isolation explores how spent fuel can be placed about a mile below the surface into deep boreholes using directional drilling techniques. ☢️

Spent fuel from commercial reactors is dangerous because of the radioactive decay of the nuclear material. While storing spent fuel is important, it is not the same as permanently disposing of it. Deep geological deposits and long-term safety of the spent fuel will keep the potential impact on the surface to a minimum. However, a significant portion of the population already lives near stored spent fuel nuclear waste. Yet, if spent fuel can be stored beneath ground where spent nuclear waste already exists, people’s perspective on the issue will change. ⚡

Discussing the technical details of this process, the discussion also covers the specifics of the canister that will contain the spent fuel. Furthermore, nuclear quality assurance will be essential for the transportation and storage of spent fuel. Finally, Baltzer discusses what an early commercial facility will look like and why the speed of SMRs and next-gen reactors could be the key to solving the issue of spent nuclear fuel waste. 🌎

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“Nuclear waste is handled and transported and stored very safely… but it is very radioactive.” 

Rod Baltzer, CEO of Deep Isolation, explains why long-term storage still matters, and how his team is approaching it differently. 

Transcript

Welcome To The Four Worlds

Steven Ruffing 0:01

Welcome to the Four Worlds Pumpkins from Tomorrow's World Committee. We're diving into the latest in tech, science, and sustainability, from nature's mysteries in the world of inspiration, to the hands-on credits of creation, the bold breakthroughs of innovation, and the scaled-up wonders of production. This is your ticket to the stories shaping tomorrow. Welcome to another episode of the Four Worlds Podcast. Today we are going underground with a company called Deep Isolation in their new way to dispose of nuclear waste. Joining us now is Romald Boltzer. Ramon, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you and we're really excited to talk about deep isolation.

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 0:41

Thanks for having me on. This ought to be a good conversation.

Steven Ruffing 0:44

I think so because what you all are doing over there is really fascinating, and that's where I kind of want to jump off at. If for anyone who may not know who deep isolation is, what deep isolation does, can you start there and address some of the challenges that you are trying to solve in the nuclear industry?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 1:02

Yeah. So deep isolation is a company that is going to dispose of the commercial spent nuclear fuel out of commercial power plants. And we use directional drilling to do that. So we drill a borehole about a mile deep underground. That can be vertical, or our patented technology takes that non-vertical. So think of directional drilling going horizontal following a formation. And we can do that at various depths depending on the nature of that site and the waste. But this is something where it now allows you to co-locate this with waste generation. So at a power plant or at a reprocessing facility or something. And you also don't have to take the entire nation's waste. It can just be a very small subset. So it's really kind of opened up different conversations. We are a global company. And so we do this around the globe, not just in the US.

Funding And Full Scale Demos

Steven Ruffing 1:52

Interesting. And so where are you in that? Are you are you starting to get some traction? Let the people know kind of what's going on on that front. How far along are you with this technology? Because it seems like you are already there.

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 2:04

Yeah, we we we founded deep isolation in 2016. And you know, as everybody knows, there's lots of oil and gas technology. This is this is nothing new. This was really just saying, man, we could use this oil and gas technology in a different application. And if we do do it in nuclear, uh, we need a little bigger borehole. So it's 21 inches instead of six to eight inches that they would normally do. But it's well within the technical realm. And so you're right, we've started developing the canister that would hold the spent nuclear fuel and the lifting attachment to make sure it could be handled by nuclear processes and equipment as well as oil and gas, and nobody drop it. You know, very, very key thing to our technology. But we've gotten very good funding through the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies and been able to develop that technology and progress it. So we've done some small-scale demonstrations at depth. So we took a three-foot-long canister about a half a mile deep and showed you could retrieve it out of that borehole as well. And then we took a full-size canister and put it near surface. And we just kicked off in January our demonstration for a full-scale, at-depth demonstration, uh, just place to orders for the long lead items and hope to get to that later this week. Or not this week, this year, sorry.

SMRs Change The Waste Contract

Steven Ruffing 3:23

No, you said this week, yeah. Jumping jumping the gun a little bit. So, with all that being said, it's all there. You have these things figured out. How do you see deep isolation's role evolving as the first mover states begin to deploy small modular reactors or SMRs and advanced reactors?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 3:44

The thing that's changed with SMRs and advanced reactors is particularly in the US, the contract has changed. So DOE makes them sign what they call the standard contract. And for the legacy fleet, all their storage costs are paid. But for these new guys, they're on the hook for their own storage cost. And so we're talking to almost every developer out there and making sure they're thinking about the back end, because that can be a pretty significant cost. And if you package it in our canister, you can store it above ground if you don't know what you're going to do with it yet. You can transport it between sites or to a different site. You can dispose of it in a mined repository if that ever comes back, or you can put it in one of our boreholes. And so, you know, it gives you a lot of flexibility. And then I think this also kind of opens up the topic of, you know, do you want to just dispose of it where it's at instead of transporting it through the state and have those conversations up front so you don't have to have those kind of awkward conversations at the end when there's a mess to clean up?

What Makes Nuclear Waste Dangerous

Steven Ruffing 4:40

Yeah, exactly. You said it best, a mess to clean up. And and before we really start getting into kind of the nitty-gritty of the technology, you know, what it is, I do want to kind of you know ask you, you know, the problem that nuclear waste does cause or a threat it poses or whatever. What's what's the biggest concern of trying to find a safe way to dispose of nuclear waste? Just to give the audience a little bit of an idea, you know, why something like this needs some sort of solution?

Faster Than Mined Repositories

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 5:10

So nuclear waste is handled and transported and stored very safely, but it is very radioactive and it's thermally hot as well. And so if you did get close to it without any of the shielding or protective barriers or anything, it it would kill you, you know, flat out. And so it's something that you want to be very careful with. It's also very long-lived. And so we do a lot of probabilistic safety and models and analysis, and we look at if we have that waste form deep underground, how long until you get to a peak dose where uh somebody may get a dose on the surface, and and that analysis shows that's about 1.6 million years into the future, and that dose is less than a check x-ray. And so you can handle it really safely at these great depths, but you know, having it out on the surface where you don't have that, and it's more you can get corrosion or other things and and and and whatnot, uh, you you just want to put that underground uh for those really long periods of time.

Steven Ruffing 6:10

Yeah, just make sure it's safe down there and not exposed to anybody because he said nasty stuff there. So, how has your your modular borehole technology kind of changed the conversation? We talked a little bit about, you know, with local communities compared to the decades-long challenges faced by large-scale mining uh repositories.

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 6:30

Yeah, I think there's two things on that. One is changing the conversation. I'm gonna call it nationally. Uh, one of the things we see is like Finland, they've got a mined repository program. They're very close to getting that operational. They've done the construction, but they've been working on it for 30 years, uh, literally 10 years to construct that mined repository because you have to construct the entire thing before you put waste in it. You've got humans underground, ventilation and other things, lots of engineer barriers. And meanwhile, you've got politics that change, sentiment that changes, administration's budgets. And so it's difficult for those really large programs to be successful just with those long timelines. When we start looking at boreholes, it takes us about two months to drill a boreholes. And so now we've got a much shorter construction timeline. I don't have to do them all at once. I can start with one and and then progress as I go. And so there's less capital requirement up front. Uh so you can move a lot faster and and and on those timelines. So I think that helps, I'll say, from a national perspective. When we start looking at you know, states and local communities, we did a survey and and basically one out of three Americans lives within 50 miles of spent nuclear fuel. Most of them don't know it, but but they do, and and it's fine. But we asked them, you know, would you prefer to take that spent fuel that's above ground in storage and transport it long distances to a centralized repository? Would you like to just keep it where it's at? Or would you like to put it safe deep underground where it's at and not transport it through your neighborhoods? And 80% said, we'll take option three. Just bury it safely where it's at. I don't want to see it again. And so it's it does change the conversation from, you know, I don't want waste in my backyard to I've already got waste in my backyard. Now what am I going to do with it?

Patents And Licensing The Tech

Steven Ruffing 8:20

Right. It's like surprise, surprise. You're probably near some sort of nuclear waste, something. So having an underground, I think that's an easy answer for most people. And once you explain the technology like you have, I mean, it seems like a no-brainer. And it kind of leads me into my next question about the future of this stuff. How, how, how much of your future growth do you expect to come from direct waste management versus licensing your IP to other engineering and environmental firms like that?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 8:52

Yeah, deep isolation does consider ourselves an IP company. We've got 99 patents now, and and we we continue to have others in the pipeline. It's across our entire life cycle. So, how do you find a site? How do you know that's a good site and has been out of touch with the surface for a million years? How do you design the well, the canister, how do you plug that well, how do you monitor during operations and after? So it's it's everything associated with that. And there's a lot of other you know operational know-how and things that we've gathered over the last almost decade. And so, you know, we we've got a lot to bring to that. We offer clients a choice. We've got a lot of supply chain partners uh that we can bring with us and we can do the entire thing turnkey, bake in our licensed products and everything, or we can you know have a menu option. If they have a national oil company and they want them to do the drilling, that's fine. And and we can sell them the IP license for the drilling, but not provide that aspect. And so it's really kind of up to them for us as a company. You know, we're we're gonna make the most money off of that IP license, uh, but we're happy to provide the service. We definitely want to make sure it's integrated and it's got the right quality and and and things, you know, we we get to the ultimate goal, which is put that safely underground.

Triple Purpose Canister Challenges

Steven Ruffing 10:09

You took you took the words right out of my mouth with all of that being said, because there is so much that goes into this stuff, especially when you're dealing with so much red tape in this industry. The ultimate goal is safely storing nuclear waste. And I think at the end of the day, that's really important to keep in mind. Yes, for sure. And you kind of said this without saying it. It's these canisters are like a triple purpose. You talked about storage, you talked about transport, and you talked about disposal. What were the most significant technical hurdles in designing a canister that is triple purpose for such diverse waste forms?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 10:44

Yeah, part of it was the waste forms. And so, you know, when you look at some of the historic what we've done in the US, it's either it's all light water reactors, so pressurized water or boiling water reactors. And it's pretty similar fuel types and and whatnot. But now you've got triso, they're pebble form, or you've got molten salt, or you've got reprocessed waste forms. Some of these have a lot hotter thermal, some have more radios dose and and content and things. So as we looked at our canister, it's like, okay, where's the envelope? You know, we need to make sure it bounds all of these things, and that can get pretty broad. And so trying to get a little bit more specific on these waste forms was uh was really a key part of it. There's also, you know, good regulations in place standardized for storage and transportation, but borehole disposal hadn't been as thought out as some of those other regulations. And so there's a little interpretation that you have to do of, you know, we we think this is how it would be applied for a borehole, but include that in the process. So I think at the end of the day, we we we achieved our goal. We had a lot of uh review and advisors and stuff look through that, uh, and we're we're pretty proud of the accomplishment that we've made.

Nuclear Grade Quality Assurance

Steven Ruffing 12:00

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is I've written about we you have our website, tomorrow'sworldtoday.com. I've written about deep isolation a lot because I am fascinated with what you guys are doing, essentially. I'll I will I'll say it straight up because it is such a unique concept and and something that really does need to be addressed, especially as nuclear energy is once again being pushed so much because of what I mean, data centers are the big one. Trying to get nuclear energy back on the forefront of clean energy is so important. And of course, you need to find a way to store it, the waste, at least. So it is, it is, you know, the short story long, I should say. So so how does how does deep isolation you know maintain high nuclear grade quality assurance while using equipment originally designed for different environmental standards?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 12:51

When you think about quality assurance, you really ought to think about processes instead of the equipment. And and so a lot of this is making sure you've got the right procedure. And so when you when you go into a nuclear facility, they've got lots of procedures and lots of check marks. And it's, you know, do you have this wrench? Is it torqued? When's the last time it's been certified? Is it made out of the right material? I mean, just to get it into the facility. And so as you kind of go through that process, it's more the process of are you collecting the data, are you analyzing it? Do you have the, you know, how do you know you've got the right waste in front of you? Is it the right canister? Have you marked it down on the paper? Have you visually laid eyes on it? Have you done a sanity check and all that as you go through, even as you check, you know, ropes and cables, wear and tear, maintenance packages and things, you know, it's all kind of proceduralized toward that. And so the the biggest aspect I think is just, you know, nobody wants to drop anything, nobody wants to do anything that's going to be off normal. And so, you know, you as we have gone through and started developing these procedures and operations as we've done our testing, we've learned a lot. And so we start to capture that knowledge and put those into the procedures to make sure we don't make any mistakes like that in a live environment. So all of our stuff right now has been, you know, cold tested. It's not radioactive. And so, you know, it's still, you know, some of this is heavy and we've got definitely, you know, safety hazards, but at least it's not uh got the radioactive aspect to it yet. Uh so we can still kind of mock it up and test it and make sure we get all the lessons learned uh before we do that in a live environment.

Steven Ruffing 14:27

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure there's some things that's that still kind of you know present some challenges, and we talk about waste forms, just kind of we've kind of generalized that. What specific waste forms still present sort of a challenge, an engineering challenge at the very least, for your borehole disposal model?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 14:44

So most of the waste forms fit pretty nicely. They're they're fairly compact and whatnot. Uh, there's always a little bit of a tension, I think, between, you know, the bigger the canister, the fewer the canisters you need, the fewer boreholes you need, so it'll be more cost effective. But the bigger the diameter of the borehole, the more it's gonna cost to drill that well. And so there's always this kind of, you know, I'd like the canister as big as possible, but I want the borehole as small as possible, but the canister has to fit in the borehole. Right. And and so that that's the biggest dynamic. And so for some of these waste forms, you know, I'll use tricell pebbles. You know, you could put, you know, one pebble each and have a very, very small narrow canister, but you're gonna have a lot of canisters. So if you can make that wider, they fit in there, they're a little bit more compact and and they have more volume, but you know, that's some of the trade-offs as we go through it.

Picking Sites And Going Deeper

Steven Ruffing 15:35

Yeah, sure, it makes it makes sense. And and I don't think we really talked about this. What what goes into picking kind of the perfect spot to drill your boreholes? And I'm sure there's no perfect spot per se.

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 15:48

Yeah, and and we'll say the beauty is we don't have to have a perfect spot. So for some of the mine repositories, you know, you've you've got to have a uh geologic formation that's fairly near to the surface, that still, you know, is gonna be isolated and whatnot. And it may be may get difficult to find those. For for us, uh, we can usually go deeper. So if we thought we were gonna be at a kilometer, but we didn't see anything that was a good formation, maybe we're at two kilometers. Uh, the deeper you go, the more isolated it is, the thicker those brines and the less transfer there is toward the surface. And so, you know, what we've found is that, you know, we did some some research, and like 80% of the nuclear power plants out there look like they probably have a decent geology next to them. Right. You'd have to do site-specific, and not every community is going to want it. But it is something where we think this is broadly applicable, whether it's shale or salt or granite or some other formation, but there's usually something that's been fairly isolated and it isn't in a high seismic or some other area like that. Right.

Horizontal Boreholes And Retrieval

Steven Ruffing 16:55

Right. Makes sense. Interesting. Interesting. And just curious, you know, you know, picking that spot. It's something that's so simple. It's like you don't sometimes don't think about it. So you touched on a little bit of the directional borehole design. How does that kind of improve the safety and feasibility of retrieving waste canisters compared to traditional vertical boreholes?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 17:17

When you uh think about these canisters, remember that they're pretty heavy. Uranium is a heavy metal and they actually weigh it as metric tons of heavy metal. And and so as you start to stack these canisters, you know, it could potentially, you know, crush one or do something like that. So you need to build in engineered supports as you go in a vertical kind of situation, depending on how deep you are, how many canisters and such. When you do it horizontally, then they just lay on their sides in the bottom. So you don't have any support structures. You don't have to think about that or engineer that into your well. And so it it works also in retrievable as you retrieve it, that you can pull those out and it would be, you know, just basically sliding them off. You don't have to worry about deconstructing some of your engineering supports as you go through there. Right, right.

Steven Ruffing 18:03

And and with that recent groundbreaking at that at the at your Halliburton facility in Texas, what are the key success metrics that you hope to achieve during this multi-year full-scale demonstration before moving into radioactive to hot? You talked about the hot radioactive waste.

Demo Metrics And First Projects

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 18:22

Yeah, our demonstration is going to be two phases. So the first phase that we've kicked off is the subsurface. And so the the main purpose of that is drill that full-sized hole. We know we can do it. The drillers know they can do it, but our customers really want to see that. They want to be able to show their local communities or regulators or others what's going on, and place that full-size canister, and we'll place a couple of them and then retrieve it out of there, show it can be retrievable. Nobody really wants to retrieve it. We don't think we'll have to, but we have to show we can if we need to. And so that that'll be our success is drill that hole and retrieve that canister. And so uh, you know, check number one. The second phase of this is the surface. And so this will be, you know, assume that a cask has shown up at the site with waste. How do you get that waste canister off the transport to the well head and then deploy downhole in a shielded environment, protecting everybody, you know, not drop it as we go through it. And so that'll be part two of it as we go through. So uh that'll be great to have that kind of end-to-end demonstration.

Steven Ruffing 19:28

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, after the demonstration, we are looking towards a first of a kind commercial project. Let's say in the next three to five years, what does that ideal first of a kind commercial project look like for you and deep isolation?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 19:43

Yeah, we're excited. We we think there's been a lot of movement toward trying to find a solution for some of this. The Department of Energy recently put out a request for information for nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses. We needed to include a disposition path in there. And so I think that's opened up a lot of discussions in the U.S. Uh, we also see overseas there's a lot of interest. We see what's happening with, you know, Russia invading Ukraine and tank shells being shot over spent nuclear fuel on the surface, and it's gotten everybody to think we need to get this below grade. So we think there are a lot of opportunities out there. Our ideal is yes, we put radioactive waste in a hole, exactly where that is, how deep that is, what that looks like, how many canisters. We really don't care that much. It's just getting that first one done and and showing that, you know, yes, it's it's now safely out of out of harm's way.

Steven Ruffing 20:35

Yeah, it makes sense. And I kind of want to as we wrap this up, just kind of leave you with kind of more of an open-ended question, just for a general audience listening that might not have so much knowledge about nuclear energy, nuclear waste disposal, retrieval. What is something that they should know about this industry as we move forward into the future?

Radiation Fears And Waste Reality

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 20:57

Uh a lot of times we get information about radiation and it and it's scary because you don't understand it. You know, you can't smell it, taste it, feel it, and and so you you it's hard to understand. When I talked about our safety analysis, you know, peak dose getting there, and it's a thousand times less than a regulatory limit of 10 millim. That's a banana. You know, you you, you know, banana has potassium, potassium is radioactive, and so you can pick that up just you know at your grocery store. So not all of it's bad, some of it's healthy, and and you know, is part of my breakfast every morning. Yeah, right. Um but you know, part of this is you know, nuclear waste has also been handled and transported, you know, millions of miles. There is a lot of experience around the globe on this. So it's not something we haven't done. We just haven't disposed of it. We just I don't know why we like to keep it. It's very compact. You know, your lifetime of nuclear waste generated from all the electricity you use is a Coca-Cola can worth. It's super compact and it is a solid, it's not green goo sludge. Off the Simpsons or anything like that. So, you know, as you I've been doing radioactive voice for 25 years. And it's a fascinating industry. There's lots of wrinkles in it. Encourage anybody to learn more about it. But it's something that's handled safely. We've learned lots of lessons from cleanup mistakes in the past, but but I'm really optimistic about the future for it.

Where To Learn More

Steven Ruffing 22:22

Yeah, absolutely. I think you said it best. If you're interested to learn more about it, definitely do so. It is, like you said, fascinating topic, and and you can find deep isolation at their website. Any other channels or anything that people could check out if they do want to learn more?

Rod Baltzer (CEO of Deep Isolation) 22:37

Yeah, our website, deepisolation.com, and we've got publications and other things, but we also have a YouTube channel, a lot of a lot of videos out there. So check us out on either of those.

Steven Ruffing 22:47

Yeah, absolutely. It's important to learn about this stuff. So, Rod, I appreciate you taking the time, kind of teaching me and hopefully teaching the audience a thing or two about nuclear waste and the fascinating stuff that deep isolation is doing. So thank you so much for joining us. I've really enjoyed it. I appreciate the conversation. Yeah, I'm glad you did. Good having you, Rod. We'll be talking soon. That's all the time. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Four Worlds Podcast. Until next time, you can catch up on the latest innovations shaping our world at tomorrow'sworldtoday.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.