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Texas Railroad Commission clears Deep Isolation to drill a nuclear-waste test borehole with Halliburton
Deep Isolation won a Texas Railroad Commission permit to drill a test borehole up to about 3 km deep near Austin, with Halliburton supplying drilling expertise. The trial uses no radioactive material and tests whether oilfield methods can build a disposal hole for spent fuel.
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What happened
- Deep Isolation says each horizontal section, about 1.5 km long, would hold six years of a steam-powered reactor's waste or ten years of a pressurized water reactor's.
- Canisters would sit end to end after a gentle curve in the hole, a layout the company says avoids the risk of stacking pressures.
- The nonprofit Deep Borehole Demonstration Center has assembled an international team of nuclear experts to help plan and run the Texas pilot.
- Deep Isolation's universal canister system was built with UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NAC International, with DOE funding.
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Why it matters
- capability If the trial works, building disposal holes becomes work for oilfield service contractors; Baltzer says people in oil and gas told him "We do this every day."
- constraint One hole covers only a few years of a single reactor's waste, so a utility would order holes one after another and the price of a single hole sets the cost of the whole program.
- cost The national pile grows about 2.2% to 2.4% a year, and each year without a disposal route adds that much to the fuel stored at reactor sites.
Spent fuel in the US stays at the reactor sites that made it. More than 100,310 tons of it sits at 94 plants [6], and the grid adds about 2,204 to 2,425 tons a year [7]. At that pace, the pile already on hand equals roughly 41 to 46 years of new output [1].
Deep Isolation's pitch is a repository. Chief executive Rod Baltzer told Fortune in August, according to Gizmodo, that the company can go twice as deep as a typical nuclear waste repository and then follow a formation that has been out of touch with the surface for a million years [9]. The permit covers a well. Deep Isolation says Halliburton brings its "subsurface, drilling, and well-construction expertise" to the project [2].
The gap between those two things decides who the test is for. Jesse Sloane, the company's executive vice president of engineering, said in a statement: "Receipt of this permit is a major milestone." [14] For Deep Isolation it is one. A utility weighing what to do with fuel on site has a narrower question. A clean result in Cameron would show that the hole can be built. Putting real fuel in one depends on a federal disposal site, and no such site has been approved anywhere in the US [8].
Baltzer also described how nuclear people reacted when they heard the plan. He told Fortune: "And everybody in nuclear went, 'Holy cow, I did not know you could do this and retrieve it. That's amazing.'" [11] Retrieval is the result I'd want to see measured first. Gizmodo's account describes the work only as a non-nuclear feasibility test [3], so the published material does not say which properties the trial will measure.
For a utility, I'd sort this on two questions. Does the method work in the field, meaning a contractor can drill the hole, place canisters and pull them back? And is there a legal destination? If the method works and a site is approved, a utility has a contract it can price. A working method with no site gives it evidence to bring to regulators and keep on file. With a site but no field data, the utility waits for data. Before this permit, the project sat in the fourth box: untested in the field, with no approved place to send the fuel [8]. Cameron can move it one square, into the box where the method works and there is still no site.
I'd treat the Cameron results as engineering evidence and keep spent-fuel budgets tied to federal siting. The cost of that caution is time. A utility that ignores the test data until a site is approved will start its own evaluation behind any utility that reads the data as it comes out.
What to watch
- Published results from the Cameron feasibility test, especially any data on placing and retrieving canisters in the horizontal section.
- Federal approval of any disposal site, the step that would let a borehole hold real spent fuel.
- A per-borehole cost from Deep Isolation, which would let a utility price a series of holes against on-site storage.