Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
One major question with respect to nuclear waste storage is how long it would be necessary to make the nuclear waste retrievable. Muller says, “So for how long it's required is a bit of a grey zone for mined repositories, most people think it is 50 years that it needs to be retrievable, but it is usually just the amount of time that the repository is open, so it is very possible that for borehole disposal it will only need to be retrievable for a couple of years as opposed to 50 years, and we think retrievability will be pretty straightforward for 20 years.”
Muller added that there are ways to have retrievability for up to one hundred years “if you really want it, but I think the question is how long do you really want it for, and I think five to twenty years is probably going to be sufficient”.
Muller was an environmentalist and climate change expert and academic before starting Deep Isolation. She said that the main motivation for creating the company was her concern “that the things we are talking about doing when it comes to climate change aren't enough ... if we really want to stop climate change, we have to do bigger things and that led to my interest in nuclear power. I think the industry has done a very good job of explaining why that shouldn't be a barrier to the future of nuclear and yet the public has not really been receptive to talking about how safe it is now and how little waste there is compared to other industries. And so it seemed to me, let's just solve the nuclear waste problem. It can't be that hard ... it's the responsible thing to do anyway.”
The drilling of the borehole would take a few months and the emplacement would also take a few months. Muller said that this means “we are not talking about 20 to 30 years to build a repository. Because we're using smaller holes, we don't need people underground. We don't need air underground. This means that we can go deeper than is possible in mined repositories.”
Muller estimates that once there is a customer and a location it might take three years to get through the licensing process. She hopes that will “get easier and faster for second locations and third locations … so we’re really looking three to five years to waste disposal from the time that we have a government and location that are interested in disposal.”
Muller estimates that a new nuclear power plant would have a lifetime of about fifty years. In order to dispose of nuclear waste produced by such a plant, at least fifteen boreholes would be required. A key part of establishing a nuclear repository is meeting with communities in areas which have nuclear power plants. One of the challenges faced by past efforts to choose sites for permanent disposal of nuclear waste has been locating a disposal site which would be acceptable to nearby communities.
Muller said that their research and public engagement has found that people object to nuclear waste being brought to their community if a national waste repository had been established near their community. However, if the community already has some nuclear waste, they tend to be more open to the idea of disposing of the waste at the place where it is already located.
Muller said that their system is modular so it can be put at the reactor site itself “which I think solves one of the biggest problems governments have faced with disposal - the reluctance to bring nuclear waste into someone’s backyard”.
Last month, Deep Isolation signed a Memorandum of Agreement with technical and engineering services provider Amentum. The two companies agreed to cooperate on the commercialization of its radioactive waste disposal technology around the globe. The companies said that initial targets for joint work include countries in Europe and the Pacific that “represent a combined addressable market for geologic disposal of spent fuel and high-level waste worth more than USD30 billion”.