Rod Baltzer, CEO, Deep Isolation

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. The nation flies till the world, there's a better way, today, there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and it's time for another retirement show. Today, I have the pleasure to invite another rod to the show, Rod Bauzer, who is the CEO of DeFi Solation. And I'll get it right off the bat. DeFi Solation is a portfolio company of nucleation, capital, because we deeply believe in the technologies they've developed and the ways that they're going about demonstrating that technology improving that it can solve one of the stickiest problems in nuclear, which is to convince people, important people, which means pretty much the public, that the nuclear industry, the nuclear technologists have developed and proven a pathway for permanently eliminating that material that's left over after reactor operations, the stuff that's truly waste. Rod, welcome to the show. Thanks Rod. Great to be here. And I'll give you the opportunity to tell the listeners of the time of the show, who are you? What do you do and why? Yeah, so, DeFi Solation has been around since about 2015, as when it was founded. And really, our mission is to provide the world safest, most cost-effective solution for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste. And we want to do that as an equitable, inclusive, sustainable approach. We think that when you can marry oil and gas, directional drilling technology with nuclear gas handling, or sorry, nuclear spilt fuel handling, that that is a really good marriage. And we can really reduce the cost, increase safety, and make this more timely. And, you know, your point that, you know, the public has some skepticism about nuclear waste. We've never disposed of nuclear waste anywhere in the world, commercial spent nuclear fuel anywhere in the world. It's getting close and fenlin in some other places. But it is something that keeps coming up in conversations and I'm glad to be here to address it today. And when you talk about safety in this case, I don't think that there's ever really any concern about whether or not we can safely from a radioactive point of view, put radioactive material deep underground and far away from people. And that will make sure that people don't get exposed to radiation. But actually building a facility to do that is not always the safest thing in the world to do. But you're opinion on that. Yeah, I mean, when you start looking at, you know, OSHA statistics on mining operations versus oil and gas versus nuclear, there's a wide difference there. And anytime you have to put people underground requires ventilation, mines safety requirements and for cave ins and just other events. And, you know, we've seen some examples. We've talked about, you know, here in the US where those mines have had issues and they wind up being closed for operations for a period of time. Whereas for bore holes, you know, they are relatively cost effective. So if there is any kind of issue that that more hold just didn't work. You know, you thought it was going to be drilled appropriately and it didn't work out. You just moved to the next one. But we really don't expect that given the number of bore holes that have been drilled over the time. We talked about mine safety and I think of course about the waste isolation pilot plant near Pearl's bad New Mexico. Where the Department of Energy is disposed, you know, of a change or anic waste, true waste from a defense weapons production processes. And they've got a great safety record there, but in 2014 they had a fire. And that did cause them to shut that down for operations for a long period of time. And it's resulted in them spending at last count I saw was about $500 million to improve the ventilation system there. Something that you really don't have with bore holes. And so that's where we kind of look at this of, you know, this is a different product. And it is something that I think we can deploy out there in a large a wider variety of locations and just handle some of the issues that have come up with nuclear waste a little bit differently than we've done traditionally. And I don't want to assume that people listening here understand what a deep bore hole is and why we think it should be used to dispose of spent nuclear fuel or the byproducts. So last little bits of nuclear fuel that have no real value the real waste. What is a bore hole and how does it work? What size material all kinds of neat stuff. I'll ask you more questions if you don't reveal what I'm asking. But I'll try to be thorough. But yes, definitely ask more questions. So when we talk about a bore hole what what we're really talking about for a pressurized water reactor. You know that fuel a single fuel assembly inside is approximately 12 inches square on the diagonal. And so we would put that into a canister. And so we would be around canister because we're going to have a round bore hole that gets drilled by oil and gas and you wanted to fit snugly in there. And so we would be about 18 inches in that bore hole at depth and that disposal zone. When we talk about a bore hole we typically are talking about roughly a mile deep. And then you could go you could leave it vertical you could go for a vertical for the disposal zone. Or you could go horizontal. That's one of the things that deep isolation is known for. And so that allows you to follow a formation. If you found a really good geologic. And you can figure out a down there that's been isolated. And you want to stay there. You can follow that formation with your horizontal ladder. And it's also helps with footprint and other things as you stay within a particular zone. And so we can do that as well. But roughly a mile deep and you could be up to a mile in your lateral as well as you go out. And so we're talking about a single fuel assembly in a single canister that into this bore hole that's roughly 18 inches in diameter. One of the things I guess I should note is that unlike a mind repository, we do expect this is a wet environment. So when you drill a bore hole. We're going to use the same oil and gas drilling technologies that they do for directional drilling. And you put drilling fluid in that bore hole to keep that bore hole open. This would be fully case to line. You've got a steel liner still casing that you put down the bore hole. It would be cemented into the into place so it doesn't move around. And that'll help keep the walls open help keep debris from falling into the bore hole and creating objects that that canister could get stuck on as you move it down. But that helps keep the pressure equal liberalized between the the pores and the inside of that bore hole. And keeps that open, but it is a wet environment when you place these canisters down so that is different than a typical mind repository. So what kind of material would be needed for the canister to survive for a long period of time in a wet environment or does it really matter whether or not it survives. And so it does matter that it survives for some period of time. You know, when we look at repositories there typically regulatory requirements that that canister be retrievable for some period of time. And there's a lot of things that we've got to do. And so it's a very, very dependent on where you're at and in the purpose. You know, in the US it was generally assumed that that was about a 50 year period of retreatability. And it was during the entire time that mine was operating. So that if there was a problem encountered or something and you decided that was a bad idea. You wanted to remove that fuel. So you can do the same thing for bore holes. And you can retrieve that canister. And we've done some small scale testing to show that. We've done large scale full size canister lift testing to show that it attaches to willing gas. So you can place it and retrieve it out of a simulated bottle. And that's all been very successful. As we look at, you know, what period of time is that, you know, the faster you can close the bore holes, the safer it is, the less proliferation concerns you may have, et cetera. And so, you know, there's really no need to keep it open that long. But we have assumed that you would have to keep it open for 50 years or so as our kind of design criteria at this point. We would love to make that shorter. It makes it easier and more cost effective as you go. You can always build more engineers design in, but it may not necessarily be needed. As far as the materials. We've looked at a pretty wide range. Our prototypes have been duplex stainless steel. But based on some of the recent corrosion testing and things we've done, it may be that just regular stainless steel is appropriate. We're still kind of analyzing that going through the rest of the design process. But that kind of materials what we're talking about. And that actually survives. It is a wet environment, but it's also reducing environment. It doesn't have oxygen depth. And so that rusting that corrosion is very limited. And so these canisters, we expect we live for thousands of years in that kind of environment. Does the canister wall itself play any role in your analysis of whether or not the material remains isolated? Not really. So we have done. Probably probabilistic risk assessments. And and looked at, you know, what what does this do over the long period of time? So let's assume you've put. a hundred and fifty three canisters into a borehole into the disposal zone. That's roughly a kilometer to a kilometer and half deep. There's a sole source aquifer above you that somebody uses to be a subsistence farmer. How long would it take radio isotopes to migrate. Up enough to infiltrate that aquifer. And what kind of dose would that subsistence farmer receive from that? It's who is we model that out. We we've looked at some generic shale environments. We've also looked at some granite environments. We've assumed shale is horizontal. Granted is vertical and looked at some of those aspects associated with it. And what we generally found is that your peak dose to that receptor at the surface is about 1.6 million years into the future. And that dose is a thousand times less than a 10 millerum limit. And so, you know, as you as you look at that, you know, 10 millerims roughly a chest x-ray. And a thousand times less than that is, you know, very, very small. And so it does give you a feel for how safe this can possibly be. And so the second 10 millerum is not only just a chest x-ray, it's also 1-30 of the average annual dose that people are inadvertently exposed to just by living on earth. If you wanted to include the average medical exposures we get, it's 160. of that dose. So it's a very tiny amount of radiation. And you say it occurs somewhere in the million a year from now. That's a long time. And how many systems farmers are out? Are there anymore? And what would that look like in a million years? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. One of the other things we did though is that, okay, in that scenario, let's assume that canister just turns to sand the first day after closure. And so instead of living for a thousand years and then releasing it, let's just release it day one through a sand environment. And it really didn't make any difference whatsoever. We then decided, okay, let's assume we'd missed some kind of fracture network. And a new fracture appeared after we closed the disposal zone and had a forced upward pressure. And it was equivalent to the sand injuries fault. What does that look like? And it did arrive faster. It was 1.5 million years instead of 1.6 million years. But really didn't change the dose much. It was still in that same ballpark. Right. Have you been following some of the advances in drilling underground that the enhanced geothermal industry is starting to make, I just listened to a podcast the other day about what Fervo is doing. And they happen to be drilling in granite rather than shells. Yeah, I have not followed it closely. But there are definitely some similarities. As far as some of the kind of sizes and depths and other things, that in carbon sequestration is kind of fascinating as far as it's all underground. It's all using some of this drilling experience that we've gained in the US over the last 20, 30 years particularly. And it seems to have some really good economic value out of it as well. Looking at your proposal, I guess, cartoons for horizontal versus deep disposal. It seems to me that the horizontal has got an advantage in that the canisters don't rest on top of each other and change the amount of weight or stresses on, say, the bottom half or bottom third of the pile. Am I looking at that wrong? Or it looks like you're just laying side by side? No, that is correct. That's one of the advantages for horizontal is that those canisters can rest on the bottom of the barrel. It's round and the canisters are round and they'll naturally kind of sit there unless you try to center them. With that, you don't need the support that you might for a vertical orientation. So with the vertical, it's always thought that you would need to put some kind of engineered bridge or plug or something else in there to help support the weight of the canisters so they don't kind of crush the bottom canister. Nobody really wants to see a canister failure. We've just talked about how that's probably not a big deal, but let's try not to do it anyway. And so that is one of the benefits. But one of the other key benefits for horizontal over vertical is that since you are typically in, though, a little bit shallow. So instead of completely vertical down toward the bottom and extending, let's call it to two miles total depth. If you stay at that one mile total depth and then go horizontal, you probably will cross less pressure differentials as you go through and thus need less casing. So I'll be back up a little bit. So when you're drilling a hole, you typically start at the bottom and then you kind of build your way up to the top. And so if I went an 18 inch borehole at the bottom, then every time I go through a different pressure differential between different strata in the geology, I'll need to put a new casing string in and seal that off so that they don't bleed into each other. And so going down a mile deep, maybe I'll need two casing strings. If I go vertically and it's two miles, maybe any three casing strings, but that means I'm much bigger at the top than I need than I would be in horizontal. And that adds additional casing, additional drilling, additional torque, larger engines, et cetera as we go. And so by keeping it in that horizontal, then I can reduce some of those drilling cost of times, just because I am quote, shower, even though that's about twice the depth kind of a mind repository that you'd see somewhere else. So how does it cost of your system compared to the cost of, say, the mind repositories that are already under construction? How does it work out and what kind of units do you use to estimate those costs? Yeah, typically we're going to talk about metric tons of heavy metal as our unit. And when we look at that, we've looked at cost in the US, UK, Canada. And I think it was Finland. And we've accumulated those kind of cost and budget estimates. And average does out through their inventories. And the average cost of disposal is around $1.1 million per metric ton of heavy metal. And so when we then go and look at what could we do that in a borehole for? We've got much lower cost for the construction and design of that borehole than a mind repository. We're about half the cost of a mind repository. Depending on your kind of waste inventory, your geology and things, it's been as low as 30% of the cost. And it can range. There's variety of factors, but my rough kind of rule of thumb for general discussions is we're half the cost of a mind repository. You mentioned that the solution is applicable to a wide variety of geologies and locations. How would you envision this being implemented in a country as large as the United States? Yeah, when you look at the United States, our law of the land right now, if the Nuclear Waste Policy Act says that you can only dispose of fuel at Yuckanam. And so it really provided all the waste in the United States going to one location in a large mind repository. And that was it. And we've seen lots of pushback. The local community was supportive. The jobs, the economic improvements and other things. The benefits, they thought were worth it. But the state in Nevada generally was opposed and against the transportation and quote being the dumping ground. We didn't produce nuclear power here. And so why are we taking all the nuclear waste kind of thing? When we look at boreholes, this is something where the deeper you go, the more promising geology opens up. You're more isolated, the deeper you go. The analog is you see a lot of natural gas being pulled out. That natural gas has been in gaseous form, saved in the rock deep below us for a million years or more. And so that's the kind of rock we want without the economic natural resource piece of it. Or nobody's going to try to go extract it after we put fuel in. And so for boreholes, we do think, you know, as we've kind of generally looked through the US, you could kick these where nuclear reactors are. And so we think probably about 80% of the nuclear reactor sites across the US probably have a grand of a shale formation there or nearby that may be suitable for this. Definitely more work needs to be done. None of this was on a site specific. This is more of a kind of broad regional kind of review of some of the geologies. Not every community is going to want it. There's lots of aspects of that we can talk about as well. But it does open it up where you would necessarily have to have somebody be the dumping ground for the entire United States and just take it for your fleet or your state or your nuclear power plant if you wanted to get that small. When we've looked at the US, you know, I'll say in general, we've envisioned that there would be 10 regional repositories and model that they stole them. You mentioned that the specific disposal costs would be somewhere around a half of what they would be with a mind repository. What is the savings in less transportation? Have you analyzed that? It seems to me, I remember looking at some of the transportation requirements for yuck a mountain. And the one that sticks out of my mind is being the most amazingly weird is that the last section of the transportation wrap from the end of the current rail line to the mountain itself was only 250 miles or so, but required 600 miles worth of track to avoid aroyo's and native territory and that kind of stuff. And in 2003, I maybe remember the number wrong, but in 2003, the estimated cost of that railroad was over a billion dollars in 2003 dollars. Yeah, and some of that kind of track can be very expensive. There's no doubt. I'd say generally, transportation call it a third of a disposal project if you're just doing regular decommissioning that may be higher for per spent fuel shipments and things as well. But as we look at this, if you did this at the nuclear power plant, you would save all that transportation that assumes that you can re-tackage it and do everything to get it into a borehole there at the plant or move mobile hot cells or other things there, use their fuel pool before they decommission. But you could definitely save a lot of transportation. And then if you did do kind of more regional, you may not necessarily have to have the rail lines installed to that extent in that array. You may be able to do kind of shorter haul aspects as well that would be cost savings. Yeah, the other thing that always worried me about the transportation part of the system is that some of the most violent anti-nuclear demonstrations with the most attendance have been in relation to shipping nuclear waste materials or the residue of reprocessing from France into Germany. So I think there was one where they had 40,000 people show up to just stop the rail from moving. Going through multiple jurisdictions throughout the US and all having to go to one site always worried me and just was never a good construct. So this distributed nature seems really a potential benefit and needs to be talked about more and more like as you mentioned, it does avoid the notion of any one site seeing itself as the nation's waste repository. Yeah, and we did a study of several years back now, but you know the average American lives within about 50 miles of spent nuclear fuel, typically in fuel pools or in a dry caskiest to see the living within about 50 miles of that. And so we did a survey in those states where there was nuclear power and people lived close to those and we asked people, would you prefer to haul it long distances to a repository far away, keep it where it's at above ground or dispose of it where it's at deep underground in a safe manner. And 80% said they would prefer to dispose of it underground where it's at than ship at long distances. They just hate the transportation aspect. It's what the safest things we do in nuclear and the public hates that with a passion as you just noted. And so I do think, you know, by providing options and letting communities have a say, and states have a say of, you know, how that waste will be treated and how it will out-and-work for them. What's going to work for them? I think it does help open up other opportunities that we've typically had. shipping the waste has a great safety or shipping radioactive material around the country, has a great safety record. But there are inevitable pains in a neck about it and costs in positions all along the way. Rales that are carrying radioactive material tend to move more slowly, especially if they're carrying large containers of radioactive material, like you would necessarily do somehow moving 70,000 tons from across the country. And so it's not just, I don't really have any concern about the safety aspects. I just think transportation is really hard, which translates into really expensive for my point of view. Yeah. And you just talked about the safety, the security aspects are also, you know, enhanced for those and add to the cost profile as well. No doubt. Yeah, that's, well, that's part of what slows down the shipments is having to provide the security and having to transition, transition guards from one place to another and some of the rail lines or even truck lines go right around or through major cities. It's just a big pain. But the distributed nature moves, it moves at me. Now, tell me a little bit about your international testing. You haven't been looking at this as just a solution for the US. As I recall, you all have some real interest in countries that are very small, but are still tasked with the notion of they have to dispose of their own waste. Yeah, absolutely. So we do deep isolation is a global company. We do have an office in the UK and our sales are based out there. We do see that Europe, particularly Eastern Europe is a place that has a lot of interest in boreholes and what that may mean. And so we have done a couple of studies with companies there and looked at their waste inventories, looked at what would that mean for boreholes and how does that work? So for example, we've looked in where Croatia and Sloone and Finn, yeah, I get Slovenia and Slovakia and Sloone. Both of them. I apologize. I'm pretty sure. That's all right. Well, Vanneh, share our reactor. And so as you look at some of this, it's like, oh, you're sharing one reactor and each country has to dispose of that waste. And so instead of building two-minded repositories for half our reactors worth of waste, how many boreholes is that? What does that look like? That's the kind of one extreme. Some of the others we've seen is like Norway right now just has research reactor waste that they have to dispose of. And so all of that might fit in one borehole. Just these are small reactors and so that may be very cost effective for them. We also had just announced a project to look at Bulgaria. We've looked at them at a high level before and again, just two reactors, I believe there. And they are looking to add new advanced reactors and SMRs. But look at what does that look like from a waste program and how would boreholes compare to a-minded repository program? And so you do see where boreholes are very modular. We do get a lot of people who, the US has a lot of waste. And so we don't have to have a -minded repository program. I'd say not necessarily. I think you could put the vast majority of that but they do have a couple of waste forms that are larger than what we've envisioned for boreholes at this time. And they just come out of the Navy program and some other things. And so yes, I think the US is going to have to have the mind-pository program. But I also think that we could have a supplement with boreholes that would make that mind-pository program more efficient and provide some of those benefits. But just talking about some of those smaller countries, yes, we're definitely looking internationally not just at Europe, but around the globe. And there's been a lot of interest in it. And part of that is the cost savings. And part of that is time scales. So we get a country like Estonia who does not have a nuclear program, but they're very interested in it. They have a law on their books that says that whoever's going to develop a new advanced reactor or small monso-reactor in Estonia has to also come with a disposal solution. And it has to be ready to go to the green qualified in Europe and get some special tax incentives and things. You have to have disposal ready by 2050. And so with a borehole, you could actually do that. It does not take us long to construct and begin operations and rest of it. But for a mind-repository program, that's probably too quick and you couldn't do it. And so those things that really made boreholes interesting outside the United States. Rod, inside the United States, is there anything in the commercial nuclear world that actually requires a mind-repository? Or could it all be done with boreholes if we just have spent fuel assemblies or the residue of recycling waste? The Nuclear Waste Policy Act says it has to be Yucka Mountain. I assume implements mother technologies there at Yucka Mountain, but I think it's specific on the site. You know, for commercial waste in the US, you could theoretically do it all with boreholes, both through the legacy fleet as well as the new reactors that may be coming online. We've got a project through the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, R2E. And that basically said, you know, allowed us to go develop what we call the Universal Canister System. And so this system has very similar features and design elements, the same lifting attachment, same kind of length and whatnot, but there are various sizes. And so the smallest is for the kind of PWR-sized fuel, I guess I'll call it. But it could also hold trisopubbles. The next size up would be trisomatrix. And the third size would be more like your vitrified glass from a recycling project. Moulton salt, the right of things, could fit in those. And you can kind of pick some of the economics, the bigger the canister, the more expensive it is, the drill, the smaller the canister, the cheaper. And so the trade-off between those is some fun math to do as you go through and designing the projects. Yeah, there was a time when I used to think of Math is fun, but I'm getting too old now. So I prefer to do a very simple. Simple arithmetic is just about my speed. And I understand maybe the sensitivities or the feelings that somebody in your position has about following the law of the land. My belief is any law that's not written by God can be changed. So I've been an advocate of changing the Nucal West Policy Act for about 43 years now. So I'll continue to be an advocate of making that silly law be changed because all it is is an obstacle. There are legitimate reasons why people have resisted being the single repository. There are legitimate transportation issues that make it silly to try to move all the ways to the most possible remote, the most remote possible location in the country, which means it's as far from every reactors that could possibly be. So anyway, that's just I'm just spouting. So you have been demonstrating some of these technologies you and your partners, which I'd like you to go ahead and mention some of your partners in this endeavor. And tell us where you do that demonstration, what's it all about? Is it something called the International Non-Proforil Organization? Yeah, so happy to talk about this. So we do have supply chain partners. The isolation is not in this by ourselves. And so we've been able to work with some top tier companies over our lifetime. So one of our supply chain partners is any senior national. They are a company based here in the US that does dry-cast storage. They are owned by a Japanese parent that can manufacture some of that material as well. But they do a lot of the dry-cast. Is to see they also do transportation logistics and other things. And so as we start to design these canisters, we've actually designed this universal canister system to be completely stuck. Yeah, what's an is to see? I know what the audience does. Sorry, good catch. It's an independent spent fuel storage facility since that's a mouthful we call it an isphysee. But it's basically a concrete pad typically next to a nuclear power plant that holds these dry-cast. And a dry-cast holds, it can vary. But for pressurized water reactor, usually it's like 37 assemblies. And these are roughly probably 10 feet in diameter at about 15 feet tall. They've got a concrete over-pack and then a metal cylinder inside them. And so these sit out on the nuclear power plant concrete pads until they're ready to be picked up for either consolidated storage if that becomes a thing in the US or disposal if we ever get there in the US as well. But as we've been working with NAC, we've designed this to be compatible with their technology. And so they had vision these dry-cast being picked up and then transported to a disposal repository. So our universal canisters are designed to fit inside the NAC magnet store and magnet train containers. And so instead of 37, you can get 12 to 19 depending on configurations and what not in those and ship them out. Some of our other partners include we've started the Deepborn Whole Demonstration Center. That's the International facility you talked about. That's a non-profit deep isolation as a member. But there's other organizations that are members of that as well. And it is independent, but it's trying to demonstrate deep boreholes and the benefit that we might see that. It is multi-national and it is a 5013C non-profit in the US. And we've been able to collaborate with SLB, their formerly known as Slumberjay, and started some demonstration testing there. Our first one was a small canister about three feet long and about six inches in diameters that we put down an existing oil and gas well and showed that we could release it and then go back retrieve it and pull it out of that well. And then we've since moved to the Halliburton testing facility. Both of these were located near the town of Cameron, Texas. So there's about an hour and a half north of Boston and about three hours south of Dallas. And we've been able to do some full-scale canisters and lift them using oil and gas equipment. We place them into a casing release them and then come back and reattach and pull them back out. And then we've also done some creation testing in a pressure chamber with Halliburton as well. And then we also have a partnership with a momentum that allows us to lean on them for some of the surface facilities and engineering safety aspects on the surface as well. So we've got the kind of sub-surface nuclear handling and surface facilities kind of covered in our supply chain. And then we also try to work through the Deep Morehold Administration Center in some of these testing and outreach information just to collaborate with others more robustly. So it sounds like the equipment, the people, the installations that you are interested into, even the geologists that would be used in your facilities, would be able to move their skills from an existing industry. Is that the idea here? Yeah, the technology is really, I'll say, proven in the various silos. And our job was really to say, okay, are they compatible? Can they reach across the aisle and shake hands? And so that did require some work, engineering and efforts. We have a lot of patents at Deep Isolation. And what we found was, yes, it absolutely can. There's definitely some similarities and some things that you've got to design from a nuclear standpoint, but also make sure you don't forget the oil and gas and vice versa. And so I talk about this lifting attachment. So this is something that you can attach. We wanted to make sure that we had a canister that could get welded shut and keep the the dose down for workers packaging that canister, put it into a transporter. And then when you've got the disposal facility, you could screw this attachment on without incurring a lot of dose. And then be able to use oil and gas equipment to lift that canister up at that point, and you know, in place it or retrieve it, whichever you needed to do. And so we haven't gone through that. We've definitely found some things we needed to correct and incorporate those into the most current designs that we've got. How many canisters would be able to be put in a single horizontal lateral? Well, it depends how long that lateral is. I'll call it a kilometer to keep the limiters long. And it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 250 canisters. Okay. And that's not really stretching, matter of fact, that's well under the current reach of the horizontal drilling that the oil and gas industry is doing. I think I read somewhere that they're going down to 15,000 feet. Yeah. They're going down that far and they also have lateral reaches that are going out, you know, 10, gosh, I think it was 10 kilometers. So yeah, it's they've got a incredible ability. What we at nuclear don't understand or at least I didn't before I started working with these oil and gas guys is the sophistication they bring. Can you see a lot of movies and it's some of this gets blown out of proportion. I think, but the depths they can do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like to make you oil and gas wells blow. Yeah. Yeah. And it just doesn't happen that way. And but these guys, they can go to these great depths and reach out laterally significantly. And we've ensured that we stayed our technology is saying staying in that call it green area where they're tried and true. They can also be very precise. So after they drilled that first well, they can stay within 10 meters of that all the way through to the and just mirror it and they're very good at that. The amount of data they pull out of their logs and things is pretty incredible. Yeah. I've always often told people, you know, the oil and gas guys have got this great sensing equipment to tell them exactly where their drill bits are and they can also find layers of shale where there's likely to be economic deposits of oil and gas. And I say, and if they can do that, they could probably use that same sensing technology to find layers where there's not any oil and gas things that are going to be stable for forever. Exactly. They're doing exactly the opposite of what they usually do. Find some place that doesn't have oil and gas and we want you to put stuff into the ground instead of take stuff out of the ground and we want to make sure it stays there for a long period of time. And they were already kind of doing that through, you know, carbon sequestration and some of those other things. But it was, you know, it's been a pretty fascinating process as we've talked through this. But even compared to carbon sequestration, you have one more thing that makes it a little simpler is you don't want the rocks to be purposely fractured to allow flow. You want to leave them intact so that it doesn't allow flow. So in other words, you're not fracking at all. You're just doing horizontal drilling. No, that's a very good point. I keep talking about directional drilling, but that's the same, you know, directional drilling technologies what they use in fracking. But we are not fracking. We do not want the formations fractured. We want them whole one intact. We don't have, you know, nuclear waste, spending there a few hours a solid and we're not, you know, putting liquids or gases or anything down these boreholes for nuclear waste. We're putting solid objects. And so it is simpler, I guess, than some of the other projects they may have. Right. When you're putting stuff underground in liquid or gases form to make sure that it, to dispose of it and deep boreholes are used for disposal of all kinds of materials, including high level toxic waste. And we've been doing that for a very long time under EPA rules. But in this case, you're not actually, and process waters, another one that gets put underground. You're not actually going to push as much fluid as possible into the fractured strata, which is the thing that can cause the ground to shake a little bit and has caused it to shakes in some places. We're putting canisters of solid material that want to gently delay there. Yeah. And when you look at the, you know, volume of material that we're going to drill out, excavate out of those boreholes. And then the volume of material we're putting back in, you know, the uranium is a heavy, heavy material. It's going to weigh it a little bit more. But it's in the same neighborhood. It's not like some of the disposal wells that get so much more water put in than it was taken out of those. Yeah. And the canisters probably kind of keep it all nice and stable because it'll keep the, the hastings from having any real differential pressure between the outside and the inside. At some point you get to where the canisters and the pressure equalizes. Yeah. Sounds like a program or a technology that is, you've been under development now. As you said for nine years, is that right? Ten years? Yeah. The idea was conceived in 2015. And then we've started, you know, I'll say you got out of stuff, stealth mode around 2018. Okay. Where do you think your first actual disposal well is going to be or disposal deep borehole is going to be installed? Yeah. You know, if I was going to make an educated guess, you know, we'd have seen a lot of interesting Eastern Europe, particularly these smaller countries that have the smaller inventories. And I do think there's a lot of interest there. You know, I think there's also opportunities for non-spits you all, but still, you know, nuclear waste, whether that's kind of a trained or any equivalent or skilled sources or other things going into a borehole and being one of the front runners as well. do you have any idea when that might happen? We think that's relatively soon. You know, I think people have seen how little progress there's been made. There's some hesitancy about continuing to just pass this problem on from generation to generation and go ahead and make a real difference. So we have seen some enthusiasm for that. I'm not going to discount that, you know, some of this is financially tied. So I talked a little bit about the green tax credits in Europe and having a disposal facility by 2050. That is motivating some. So they can attach bonds and other things to projects that have this attached, you know, to it and then have nuclear be green. So you know, that's part of moving this forward as well. fascinated by this idea that we have this available option that doesn't get a whole lot of attention, which is why you're on this podcast because I think it deserves a lot of attention and I think it deserves some conversation. But Ron, tell me a little bit more, what do you think some of the issues are? Why isn't this getting the kind of attention that deserves? Is it that fact that the law of the land still says we have to build this mind repository somewhere in a place that nobody did, the people who matter don't want and even the current president pledged not to do it when he was running for offers? Yeah, you know, it's so for Yakima, I do think it's time to change the Equal Waste Policy Act. There's about two sentences you need to change it there to allow you to start a second repository without having to wait on Yakima. I don't think you have to kill Yakima if you start a process and Nevada changes at mine, it's mine. It wants to go back to it. Great. You've spent a lot of time in effort to characterize that. No need to throw it out. But I do think it's time to move on and look at other options because that one's just not moving. And so I think that's where, you know, boreholes really make a lot of sense is trying another option. And I think there's a lot more equity in this process where, you know, if you're going to place this, you know, we did a, every day to study, we're part of that. And it basically said, can you co-laid Cape Warhol disposal with a new SMR and advanced reactor? And yes, you can. And you know, if you went to a community and you said, hey, we're going to, you know, put a reactor here and it's going to create all these jobs and tax benefits. But you're also going to dispose of the waste here and it's going to be safe. And it's going to allow us to do all this. You know, here's the entire package. Let's look at this soup to nuts. I think that's important to allow a community to say, yes, that's what we're signing up for. None of them signed up to have, you know, interim storage pads, instances next to their communities for 100 years. But you know, they're, they've been there 60 years and you know, it isn't going to move, you know, there's some things out there. So I do think there's some options and opportunities. A couple of things on this note, you know, we've also looked at and we did this in the context of the United Kingdom. You know, if you could put boreholes with a mind repository, what does that do? Well, you can take some of the higher heat generating waste out of a mind repository. And that could shrink the footprint of that mind repository significantly. And so it helps you with your design and some of the economics and things as well. So, you know, people ask me a lot, you know, is deep isolation of pose to mind repositories. You know, some countries are going to need those that got large waste forms. They got other requirements or things they want to put in that mind. You know, we're definitely not. opposed to that. But what we are saying is, yeah, you ought to look at all your options to make sure you've identified the most effective efficient use of your solution. And we think Borhils could be a part of that. People also say, well gosh, you know, we're not going to need any disposal because recycling is going to take care of everything. And I continue to say, no, I think there's still going to be bits left over. It will be a reduced volume. activity. But you're still going to have something left over at the end of that. And we've been working with some of the recycling companies here in the US that are advanced and looking at some of this. And I think they see that Borhils could be interesting as some of their solutions. And that's one of the reasons we've got this universal tannister made for some the recycling by products that come out of there is waste. And so I think there's a lot of things we can do. We do need action in the US. We've just been sitting around, racking up fees for very long period of time. We as taxpayers have been paying that and not the rate payers, not the utility owners, but the taxpayers have been paying that out of a judgment fund. And it's just time to make some real progress and take care of this. I agree. I know there's a lot of people that are perfectly content with the way we're doing things now because it is basically a non cost item for them. But that's not good for the rest of the country. And it's certainly not good for the progress of getting people to accept and be comfortable with nuclear, including the fact that we have a way to get rid of the material at the end of the process. I guarantee anyone that recycling is not going to be 100% of the material recycled. There's no recycling process in human history that has been able to get 100% recovery. So, Rob, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your knowledge and for developing, helping to develop this important technology. Do you have any final words for the audience? Now, I really, really appreciate you inviting me on. If you want to find out more, you can always visit our website, depisolation.com, depisolation.org. But yeah, enjoy it. Thank you so much for the Adam, maybe your program. Hey, and if there's some people here who are really deeply interested, it made the professional interest. Did they get a tour of your four-hole demonstration center? Yeah, they're welcome to reach out info at depisolation.com and we'll get you some more information. Perfect. Thanks, Rob. Take care. All right, thanks for that. For this atomic show, I was speaking with Rod Bulser, the chief executive officer of Deep isolation. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Atomic Show. This is Rod Adams. I've been your host for the Atomic Show for more than 15 years. As the publisher of Atomic Insights, I've been speaking with experts in analyzing nuclear energy for more than three decades. About half a decade ago, it became clear that investing in advanced nuclear developments could provide exceptional returns. Successful investors facing Silicon Valley agreed. 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