Deep Isolation has finished its $20 million Series A fundraising efforts, the Berkeley, California company announced Tuesday.
This capital investment venture has been underway since January. That money is intended to help line up a targeted $50 million worth of sales and contracts.
On top of this amount, Deep Isolation has lined up roughly $5 million in in-kind engineering and business help from Bechtel and NAC International. Bechtel, under a 2019 memorandum of understanding, will provide Deep Isolation with project management, business, and engineering support in exchange for later support on environmental remediation programs for the federal government.
Deep Isolation is developing a borehole disposal concept, which would take spent fuel assemblies from reactors and put them in 14-foot long canisters that are 9 to 13 inches in diameter. These would be inserted in vertical boreholes — 14 to 18 inches in diameter — that extend from a couple thousand feet to a couple miles deep. Such a borehole would gradually curve to become a narrow horizontal tunnel that could possibly extend for another two miles.
After a horizontal section is filled with canisters, the vertical boreholes would be filled and sealed with rock, bentonite, and other materials.
NAC International, the spent nuclear fuel storage and transportation provider, will provide canister technology for Deep Isolation.
Besides hunting for U.S. clients, Deep Isolation opened a London office early this year to seek customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
In June, Chris Parker, joint managing partner for its European, African and Middle Eastern business, said several nations in this region have only two to six reactors, which would make them prime clients for Deep Isolation, since a field of boreholes would be dramatically smaller and less expensive than a full-fledged used nuclear fuel repository.
According to the 2020 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, the following nations fit a one-to-six-reactor description: Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
