Former Waste Control Specialists President and CEO Rod Baltzer said Wednesday he has joined another radioactive waste management company as chief operating officer.
“I am the Chief Operating Officer of Deep Isolation … a startup company focused on the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel deep underground,” Baltzer said in an update to his LinkedIn profile. “My responsibilities include interactions with communities, utilities and government entities as we prepare to license a disposal facility.”
Berkeley, Calif.-based Deep Isolation aims to use a patented “directional drilling” method for deep underground long-term storage and disposal of spent nuclear reactor fuel and other radioactive waste types. The approach would involve drilling a narrow hole, 9 to 14 inches in diameter, 1 mile into stable rock, according to the company website. The hole would then ease into a horizontal space for disposal of the radioactive waste.
The company touts various benefits of its approach, including saving money by building smaller disposal spaces and drilling near nuclear plants to reduce transport of radioactive waste. One hole could hold eight years’ worth of waste from a boiling-water reactor and 33 years of waste from a pressurized-water reactor, it says.
While he said he could not discuss specifics, Baltzer on Wednesday told RadWaste Monitor the company is in discussions with utilities and communities about possible projects.
“Deep Isolation is looking at a variety of sites,” he said in a telephone interview. “They ideally would like to dispose of spent nuclear fuel in a deep formation, preferably in or beneath a shell layer that’s been stable for millions of years. This opens it up to commercial spent fuel, you could use DOE defense waste and other aspects associated with that.”
The company noted on its website that any disposal site would require licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take up to three years. The hole itself could be ready within one year from the start of drilling, Baltzer said.
Deep Isolation was co-founded in 2016 by Richard Muller and his daughter, Elizabeth Muller, partners in several ventures who are now respectively chief technology officer and chief executive officer. It has raised about $5 million to date from a number of “substantive social impact investors and other investors investing for the potential financial gain,” Deep Isolation spokesman David Hoffman said by email. Along with its patent on waste storage in or below geologic shale layers, the company is seeking three others for its process.
Baltzer spent 12 years as president of Waste Control Specialists, which operates a radioactive and hazardous waste disposal facility in West Texas. He served another two-and-a-half years as president and CEO, leaving in January of this year when Waste Control Specialists was sold from holding company Valhi Inc. to private equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co.
Baltzer did some consulting with Deep Isolation in recent months prior to joining the company in an executive position. Having taken on a full-time position he is no longer operating Baltex Consulting.
Under its new ownership, Waste Control Specialists is partnering with Orano on plans for an interim spent fuel storage site on its Andrews County property. Holtec International is planning a separate site in southeastern New Mexico. They would theoretically compete with Deep Isolation for temporary storage of spent reactor fuel, which the Department of Energy by law is required to remove from U.S. nuclear power plants (though DOE is more than two decades beyond its legal deadline to begin this work).
All that material will eventually have to be placed in a permanent repository – possibly below Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But that site is currently capped at disposal of 77,000 metric tons of waste, which is already less than the existing amount of of spent fuel and high-level defense waste it is supposed to hold. That creates an opening for Deep Isolation to handle some of the excess, Baltzer said: “This just gives the Department of Energy additional arrows in its quiver.”
