Nuclear Waste Borehole Demonstration Center started

Collaborators are lined up, but the center is homeless at the moment.

HOWARD LEE - 3/17/2023,

An artist’s impression of a deep borehole for nuclear waste disposal by Sandia National Laboratories in 2012. Red lines show the depth of mined repositories: Onkalo is the Finnish one, and WIPP is the US DOE repository for defense waste in New Mexico.
Sandia National Laboratories

Deep Isolation, a company founded in 2016 and headquartered in California, launched a “Deep Borehole Demonstration Center” on February 27. It aims to show that disposal of nuclear waste in deep boreholes is a safe and practical alternative to the mined tunnels that make up most of today’s designs for nuclear waste repositories.

But while the launch named initial board members and published a high-level plan, the startup doesn’t yet have a permanent location, nor does it have the funds secured to complete its planned drilling and testing program.

Although the idea to use deep boreholes for nuclear waste disposal isn’t new, nobody has yet demonstrated it works. The Deep Borehole Demonstration Center aims to be an end-to-end demonstration at full scale, testing everything: safe handling of waste canisters at the surface, disposal, possible retrieval, and eventual permanent sealing deep underground. It will also rehearse techniques for ensuring that eventual underground leaks will not contaminate the surface environment, even many millennia after disposal.

But it will do all that without any actual nuclear waste: “This site, to be clear, will never be used for radioactive waste disposal,” said Liz Muller, CEO of Deep Isolation and chair of the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center’s board.

“What this is intended to do is to really bring people together to understand what are the principal issues that need to be resolved before we go forward,” said Ted Garrish, the launch executive director of the center. “There's nothing really new here in terms of the actual technologies; it's just marrying them together and doing it in a nuclear environment.”

Universal canister

By the time of this announcement, the center’s first exercise at “marrying” standard oil drilling and nuclear technology had already started. In February, there was a technology demo at a borehole equipment testing site near Cameron in Texas. “We have to have an attachment mechanism for this nuclear-designed canister to attach to standard oil and gas rigging,” explained Muller.Advertisement

They used a newly designed canister big enough to enclose a 14-foot-long spent fuel assembly from a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). They latched onto it using standard oilfield equipment, lowered it through the floor of the drill rig, and unlatched it there. They later latched back onto it and fished it out again.

With funding by the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, Deep Isolation is designing a new universal canister that can fit into a borehole and take waste generated by different reactor designs, not just PWRs: “We are talking to a number of different advanced reactor companies, what is their waste form going to look like, can we design it in such a way that it will fit into this universal canister?” said Muller, who thinks they should all fit into a canister the same size as their PWR spent fuel canister used in February’s test.

Decentralized disposal

A universal canister should make deep boreholes suitable for a variety of nuclear wastes, while the depth of boreholes should make them suit a variety of locations.

At the depths that mined nuclear waste repositories are constructed—around 400 meters deep—there’s typically quite a lot of flowing groundwater that can bring contaminants to the surface. Mined repositories for nuclear waste must therefore find uncommon locations, ones where the rock is tight and the water static, ensuring that leaks at the repository won’t move far, even after millennia. But by going much deeper, Muller argues, the waste can be placed at depths where groundwater flow is typically minimal, so there’s much less restriction on suitable locations. “The geology is much more flexible than it is when you're looking at a mined repository,” said Muller. “When you're going much deeper, when you're going a kilometer, two kilometers deep, there are many more locations that are suitable.”

That means there could potentially be deep borehole disposal facilities at most of the places where nuclear waste is generated, reducing the need to ship nuclear waste to a centralized facility, such as the failed Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. “We expect the first iterations of Deep Isolation technology to be at existing waste facilities,” Muller said.

“I think if we've learned anything from the attempts to... have consolidated locations and to move [nuclear waste] across states, I think the big lesson, the big, big take home lesson is: don't do it!” said Muller. Transportation of nuclear waste is still, to this day, cited as one of the objections by the state of Nevada to the Yucca Mountain disposal site.

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Undecided details

Key aspects of the center are yet to be decided, including its location.

It’s not clear if the center will be based at the oil industry equipment testing and training borehole in Texas where they carried out their February demonstration or if it will be elsewhere: “Whether we proceed at this location, or we go to another location will depend completely on what our sponsors and the board decides,” said Garrish. Presumably it will also depend on what arrangements they can make with the current operators of the Texas site.

Other details, like the depth, profile, and even the number of boreholes, are also still to be decided. “We have a whole facility that we can use. We can do more than one hole based on what the participating governments want to see,” said Muller, speaking of their future plans.

Not only does the center lack a location, it currently lacks money to do all the testing it's planning. Drilling is notoriously expensive, with rates in the region of $50,000 per day for a land-based rig, even without the attending services and nuclear waste disposal research. It’s clear that the center will need to work on obtaining the funds needed to deliver on its promises. “The amount of money that it takes in order to do this kind of research largely is government-related, so I think we will be looking to governments that are interested in developing these technologies in their countries, and they will in some way contribute for the research that they are most interested in,” said Garrish. “The idea is to have a public-private partnership.”

Europe presses ahead…

The majority of those countries are in Europe: “Our orientation initially is going to be to look at the countries that have expressed an interest in this, and our research has shown that... is mainly in Europe,” Garrish told Ars.

That’s because the switch from fossil fuels has increased European focus on nuclear power, while new “EU taxonomy for sustainable activities” rules require new reactors to have a nuclear waste solution by 2050. This deadline is concentrating European minds, and Garrish believes deep boreholes can be done more quickly and cost-effectively than mined repository projects, which have taken decades in some countries.

Last year a group of European countries, including Slovenia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Croatia, Belgium, and Norway, concluded that “deep borehole disposal is feasible with existing technology and may be a suitable and cost-competitive alternative... ” to mined repositories, adding: “The natural next step in the development of deep borehole disposal is a full-scale demonstration.”

Garrish told Ars that same group of countries is interested in joining the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center, and a representative from the Czech Republic is already on the center’s board

... as US law is stuck in 1987

Borehole nuclear waste disposal in the US faces bigger challenges. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended in 1987, still mandates Yucca Mountain as the national waste repository for spent fuel and other non-military wastes, despite the project being abandoned in 2010. “We cannot apply for a license, because we are not at the Yucca Mountain facility,” said Muller. “I don't think we're going to have the ability to address that head-on until we have a success under our belt.”

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Ars last year (for our feature on the topic) that their regulations were not written with deep boreholes in mind. The 2012 “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future” recommended the EPA and NRC update those regulations to cover deep boreholes, so Garrish hopes the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center will provide the impetus for those revisions: “My feeling is that EPA and NRC will be very interested,” he said.

Despite the legal and regulatory hurdles in the USA, a representative from the Atlanta-based energy company Southern Company is also on the board of directors of the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center.

Two growing problems to solve

Garrish sees nuclear power as essential in responding to the growing problem of climate change: “In order to move forward with the climate issue, nuclear is going to have to play a greater part,” he said. The Biden administration in the US and governments elsewhere agree.

Despite ongoing debate about the need and cost-effectiveness for nuclear power to provide electricity when weather curtails renewables like wind and solar, as old reactors have their lives extended and new ones come online, the already-large inventory of nuclear waste needing disposal will inevitably grow, too.

Howard Lee is a freelance science writer focusing on geology and climate change in deep time. He holds a BS in geology and MS in remote sensing, both from the University of London, UK. He was employed in the UK nuclear waste disposal program prior to 1998.