One of the Department of Energy’s major contractors has sealed a cooperative agreement with a young California company that is offering a “drillhole” approach for disposal of nuclear waste.
Under the memorandum of agreement announced Monday, Bechtel will offer project management, business, and other support to assist Deep Isolation in selling its technology to the Energy Department and other potential customers in the United States and abroad.
Deep Isolation, in turn, aims to support Bechtel’s work in the DOE cleanup and commercial nuclear decommissioning sectors.
Details of the cooperation remains to be determined, according to both companies. An initial meeting is expected in the next couple months, Deep Isolation executives said Wednesday.
The memorandum of agreement is “fresh off the press, so to speak,” Deep Isolation Chief Operating Officer Rod Baltzer told RadWaste Monitor. “We’re still to have a kickoff meeting to get a little more detail in specifics about how exactly we’ll execute that, but I think both companies are very much looking forward to it.”
The companies also did not discuss financial details of the pact, which was a year in the making.
“With Deep Isolation’s patented technology and Bechtel’s long history in commercial nuclear power and federal government environmental cleanup work, there was excellent and a natural synergy between the two companies,” Bechtel spokesman Fred deSousa wrote in an email. “The MOA is the first formal step between the two companies on the path to seeing deep geologic disposal become a reality in the near-term.”
Reston, Va.-based Bechtel is the prime contractor and a partner in a number of multibillion-dollar contracts for the Department of Energy, including construction of the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. It is one of the parent companies for Savannah River Remediation, which on April 1 received an 18-month contract extension worth about $750 million to its liquid waste management contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In the commercial nuclear sector, Bechtel is completing construction of two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Across the Atlantic, its work includes partnering for decommissioning a nuclear waste storage facility at the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom.
Deep Isolation formed in 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. It is marketing a patented “directional drilling” technology for geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste. Under that approach, 18-inch holes would be drilled thousands of feet into stable rock. The vertical holes would ease into a horizontal space where the material itself would be deposited. The company is operating on seed funding while it works to secure its first contracts.
On its website, Deep Isolation notes there is roughly 450,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel in storage and awaiting final disposition. About 80,000 metric tons of that is held in the United States, with the domestic stockpile growing by 2,000 tons annually.
That material is now stranded at the power plants where it was generated, despite Congress’ direction in 1982 that the Energy Department begin disposing of spent fuel by Jan. 31, 1998. The agency has not yet secured a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for its planned geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. Two corporate teams, meanwhile, are seeking NRC licenses for facilities that could hold the waste for decades until permanent disposal is ready.
Deep Isolation management says it offers a faster, cheaper alternative to waste disposal that would not require cross-country transportation.
Informal conversations with Bechtel might predate the official existence of the company, co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Muller said in a telephone interview. Industry veteran Baltzer, formerly president and CEO of Waste Control Specialists, was able to initiate more formal discussions with Bechtel after joining Deep Isolation last summer.
“It was pretty clear very early on that Bechtel got what we were trying to do,” Muller said. “The fact that an organization like Bechtel really understood and appreciated the innovation that Deep Isolation is bringing into the field, was important to us as a very early stage company.”
