By John Stang
Deep Isolation, a nuclear waste disposal startup wants to raise $10 million to $15 million in venture capital investment, the company said this week.
The company is developing a borehole disposal concept, in which fuel assemblies containing spent fuel rods are placed in a canister and buried some 2,000 feet below the surface in a very narrow, L-shaped tunnel. After the L-tunnel’s horizontal section is filled with canisters, the boreholes would be sealed with rock, bentonite, and other materials.
The Series A round that the 22-person company hopes to jump start would help it “to identify specific sites, begin rock characterization, and start drilling,” Elizabeth Muller, Deep Isolation’s chief executive officer, wrote in Tuesday’s press release. “Community and stakeholder engagement will continue to be a major focus and remains a core competency.”
In a Thursday phone interview, Muller said the Series A round will last until the $10 million to $15 million is raised, which she speculated to take three to six months. 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.
NAC International, the spent nuclear fuel storage and transportation provider, will produce canister technology for Deep Isolation. 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 has roughly a half dozen companies interested in its concept with Muller hoping to sign one up “really, really soon.”
Previously, Deep Isolation raised roughly $14 million in angel and seed rounds from investors, friends, and members of the company.
In early 2019, Deep Isolation demonstrated its prototype canister at an undisclosed commercial oil and gas testing facility near Austin, Texas. The demonstration canister held a nonradioactive steel rod. It was lowered down an existing drill hole, after which a small “tractor” pushed it into place in a horizontal storage space. The same device was then used to bring the canister back to the surface after several hours.
Deep Isolation does not expect to do much additional research and development, but will now concentrate on nuts-and-bolts engineering matters, Muller said “The technology we’re using using is mostly mature technology,” she said.
The company is also beginning work on getting the appropriate license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which Muller speculated could take at least two years.
