Guest commentary by David Middleton
Hat tip to Dr. Willie Soon
The Deep Isolation concept is a proposal by Dr. Richard Muller (of BEST “fame”) and his wife daughter, Elizabeth Muller. The team also includes our good friend Steve Mosher.
While I didn’t see many (or any) drilling engineers in their “roster,” they do list Scott Tinker, Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas as a member of their advisory board. The Texas BEG has in the past evaluated East Texas salt domes as potential nuclear repositories.
Right after reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, geologic sequestration is the second best solution for high level nuclear waste. This is from the Deep Isolation FAQ’s page:
Deep Isolation Technology
What is the Deep Isolation concept, in simple terms?
Rather than use large tunnels, Deep Isolation will place nuclear waste in narrow (8 to 14 inch in diameter) horizontal drillholes in rock that has been stable for tens of millions of years. No humans need to go underground. The small diameter drillholes are markedly different than the 18 to 25-foot diameter tunnels of the planned Yucca Mountain repository.
Deep Isolation drillholes will go down about a mile vertically and then gently turn horizontal. The waste would be stored in the deep horizontal section. This approach has several key benefits. First, horizontal drillholes, especially with an upward tilt and a “plumber’s trap” can prevent radioactive material from reaching the vertical portion of the borehole, and reduce dependency on man-made barriers. Second, placing the canisters in a long horizontal borehole increases the storage room without having to drill overly deep (at which point pressure can increase cost), or to have to worry about stacked canisters being crushed by their own weight.
The drilling industry has already perfected ways to place objects in deep boreholes, and retrieve them, all robotically.
For a visual summary of a Deep Isolation borehole, see Figure 3 at the end of this document.
Can you really put three miles of continuous steel liner (a “casing”) down the drillhole (1 mile of vertical access and 2 miles of horizontal storage)? How does it get around the curved section?
Doing so has become straightforward in the drilling industry. The rig set up above the drillhole is used to support the drilling system, and also to place the continuous steel casing into the hole. In the rig, 40-foot-long sections of casing are screwed together as they are lowered into the hole. The curved region that transitions from a vertical to a horizontal borehole has typically a 700-foot radius of curvature, and the steel casing flexes easily around this bend. This has been done in over 50,000 drillholes in the US in the last two decades.
Do you pick sites that are suitable for gas and oil recovery?
The ideal geology for waste isolation has no recoverable natural resources. We prefer rock that is ductile, so it is fracture resistant. Typically, this means clay-rich, and this feature makes the rock unsuitable for fracking.
Why didn’t someone think of this before?
The Yucca Mountain tunnel repository was chosen by the US government in the 1980s, due for completion in 1998, before the new drilling technologies were highly developed. When the Yucca Mountain facility ran into physical and political problems, no alternatives could be considered because the Nuclear Waste Policy Act specified that they could not be licensed. Our solution provides an additional disposition pathway for commercial spent nuclear fuel and DOE nuclear waste inventories and should be considered as a second disposal option.
Can all that waste fit in narrow drillholes?
Spent nuclear fuel is compact, amounting to only 2 cubic meters per year for a gigawatt (thousand megawatt) reactor. Coal waste takes over a million times as much volume. One drill hole has 1000 cubic meters of space, enough for 20-reactor years of waste, assuming that we do no repackaging of the fuel assemblies. The assemblies that hold the waste fit in long narrow canisters that can be lowered into a drillhole.
What keeps the radioactivity from reaching the surface?
The Deep Isolation design relies on both engineered and geological barriers so there is built-in redundancy to the system.
The deep geology of the Deep Isolation design is a significant barrier. If there were to be any releases, they would have to get through a mile of rock, over a billion tons, including layers that have held volatiles (methane) for millions of years.
Additional engineered barriers include the ceramic pellets themselves, the metal rods that contain them, the bentonite surrounding the rods, sealed steel canisters that hold the rod assemblies, steel casing that lines the drillhole, and the cement that fills the space between the casing and the drillhole.
For geologic times, the geology is a key barrier. The geologic formations that would be used have been stable for tens of millions of years.
Why a mile deep?
The waste is placed far below aquifers, in regions in which water has had no contact with the surface for a million years or more. We will dispose in or under geologic formations that have been stable for tens of millions of years. Typically, this means a depth of about a mile, but in some locations it could be as shallow as 3000 feet, or as deep as 10,000 feet. Drilling such holes is now routine, and the drilling industry has made over 50,000 of such horizontal drillholes over the last 20 years.
[…]
Can the waste be retrieved?
Yes. The drilling industry regularly retrieves objects and monitoring instruments from boreholes, and the process is standard. Once the vertical drillhole is sealed, an expert crew could still retrieve the waste, but it would take a week or possibly longer. Doing so is sufficiently complex to offer substantial security from a terrorist attempt
[…]
A few thoughts on this:
Can you really put three miles of continuous steel liner (a “casing”) down the drillhole (1 mile of vertical access and 2 miles of horizontal storage)?
Yes. We do this every day of the week in oil & gas drilling.
Do you pick sites that are suitable for gas and oil recovery?
The ideal geology for waste isolation has no recoverable natural resources. We prefer rock that is ductile, so it is fracture resistant. Typically, this means clay-rich, and this feature makes the rock unsuitable for fracking.
Shale is generally a clay-rich rock…
What is shale?
A strict geological definition of shale is any “laminated, indurated (consolidated) rock with > 67% clay-sized materials” (Jackson, 1997). Approximately 50% of all sedimentary rocks are classified as shale. Shales are often deposited in low-energy depositional environments where the fine-grained clay particles fall out of suspension.Reference: Jackson, J.A. (1997). Glossary of Geology, 4th Ed. American Geological Institute
While “clay-sized materials” doesn’t necessarily require clay mineralogy, most of the shales that are frac’ed are fairly abundant in clay mineralogy.
Ductile shales tend to have low quartz and carbonate fractions and tend to plot more or less in the center of this ternary diagram:
If they’re planning on drilling these horizontal disposal wells in areas unsuitable for frac’ing… There’s not likely to be a lot of well data… So I’m not sure how they plan to identify ductile shale formations at depth. I suppose they could focus on failed shale plays, where the rocks were unsuitable for frac’ing.
The Texas BEG did take a serious look at using East Texas salt domes as waste repositories (Jackson & Seni, 1984). Salt (halite) is very ductile and generally clay-free.
Why a mile deep?
The waste is placed far below aquifers, in regions in which water has had no contact with the surface for a million years or more. We will dispose in or under geologic formations that have been stable for tens of millions of years. Typically, this means a depth of about a mile, but in some locations it could be as shallow as 3000 feet, or as deep as 10,000 feet. Drilling such holes is now routine, and the drilling industry has made over 50,000 of such horizontal drillholes over the last 20 years.
There’s no “magic” depth. Each site would have to be evaluated in detail.
Can the waste be retrieved?
Yes. The drilling industry regularly retrieves objects and monitoring instruments from boreholes, and the process is standard. Once the vertical drillhole is sealed, an expert crew could still retrieve the waste, but it would take a week or possibly longer. Doing so is sufficiently complex to offer substantial security from a terrorist attempt.
“The drilling industry regularly retrieves objects and monitoring instruments from boreholes” that were designed to be retrieved: wireline logging instruments, drill strings, etc. “Once the vertical drillhole is sealed,” the removal of objects designed to stay in the well are expensive and time-consuming to retrieve, if they are even retrievable. The one drawback to this sort of disposal system is that, unlike cavernous facilities, retrieval of disposed waste is extremely difficult. This sort of method is more suitable to permanent disposal.
Why didn’t someone think of this before?
Someone did think of it before…
SANDIA REPORT
SAND2009-4401
Unlimited Release
Printed July 2009
Deep Borehole Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste
Patrick V. Brady, Bill W. Arnold, Geoff A. Freeze, Peter N. Swift, Stephen J. Bauer, Joseph L. Kanney, Robert P. Rechard, Joshua S. Stein
Prepared by
Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185 and Livermore, California 94550
[…]
Preliminary evaluation of deep borehole disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel indicates the potential for excellent long-term safety performance at costs competitive with mined repositories. Significant fluid flow through basementrock is prevented, in part, by low permeabilities, poorly connected transport pathways, and overburden self-sealing. Deep fluids also resist vertical movement because they are density stratified. Thermal hydrologic calculations estimate the thermal pulse from emplaced waste to be small (less than 20° C at 10 meters from the borehole, for less than a few hundred years), and to result in maximum total vertical fluid movement of ~100 m. Reducing conditions will sharply limit solubilities of most dose-critical radionuclides at depth, and high ionic strengths of deep fluids will prevent colloidal transport.
[…]
DOE estimates that 109,300 metric tons heavy metal (MTHM) of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel – primarily commercial spent nuclear fuel (CSNF), but also DOE spent nuclear fuel (DSNF), and high-level waste glass (HLWG) – will need to be disposed of in the US (the projected US HLW and SNF inventory is summarized in Appendix A).,Deep borehole disposal, characterization and excavation costs should scale linearly with waste inventory: small inventories require fewer boreholes; large inventories require more boreholes. Not needing a specially engineered waste package would also lower overall borehole disposal costs. Both aspects might make borehole disposal attractive for smaller national nuclear power efforts (having an inventory of 10,000 MTHM or less). In the US, the 70,000 MTHM of waste currently proposed for Yucca Mountain could be accommodated in about 600 deep boreholes (assuming each deep borehole had a 2 km long waste disposal zone that contained approximately 400 vertically stacked fuel assemblies). The remainder of the projected inventory of 109,300 MTHM could be fit into an additional 350 or so boreholes.
Because crystalline basement rocks are relatively common at 2-5 km depth (See Figure 2; also see O’Brien et al. 1979; Heiken et al. 1996), the US waste disposal burden might be shared by shipping waste to regional borehole disposal facilities. If located near existing waste inventories and production, shipping would be minimized. A disposal length of ~2km, and holes spaced 0.2km apart suggests the total projected US inventory could be disposed in several borehole fields totaling ~30 square kilometers.
Petroleum drilling costs have decreased to the point where boreholes are now routinely drilled to multi-kilometer depths. Research boreholes in Russia and Germany have been drilled to 8-12 km. The drilling costs for 950 deep boreholes to dispose of the entire 109,300 MTHM inventory, assuming a cost of $20 million per borehole (see Section 3.1), would be ~ $19 billion. Very rough estimates of other costs are $10 billion for associated site characterization, performance assessment analysis, and license application, $20 billion for disposal operations, monitoring, and decommissioning, $12 billion for ancillary program activities, and $10 billion for transportation, resulting in a total life-cycle cost for a hypothetical deep borehole disposal program of $71 billion (in 2007 dollars). Although there are significant uncertainties in the cost estimates for deep borehole disposal presented here, the estimated total life-cycle cost may be significantly lower than the estimated total cost of Yucca Mountain. Note in particular the lower construction/operation and transportation outlays that borehole disposal would allow.
This document outlines a technical and performance assessment analysis of deep borehole disposal of US HLW and SNF.
[…]
This is worth repeating:
The drilling costs for 950 deep boreholes to dispose of the entire 109,300 MTHM inventory, assuming a cost of $20 million per borehole (see Section 3.1), would be ~ $19 billion. Very rough estimates of other costs are $10 billion for associated site characterization, performance assessment analysis, and license application, $20 billion for disposal operations, monitoring, and decommissioning, $12 billion for ancillary program activities, and $10 billion for transportation, resulting in a total life-cycle cost for a hypothetical deep borehole disposal program of $71 billion (in 2007 dollars).
$71 billion (in 2007 dollars) to safely and permanently dispose of the entire inventory of 109,300 metric tons heavy metal (MTHM) of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel.
That would be $84 billion in 2017 USD.
According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy June 2017, from 1965-2016, US nuclear generating stations produced 26,386 TWh of electricity (26.4 trillion kWh).
$84 billion divided by 26.4 trillion kWh is $0.0032/kWh… 1/3 of one penny per kWh to dispose of the entire inventory of high-level nuclear waste.
The geologic sequestration of high level nuclear waste is almost trivial.
The main difference between the Sandia proposal and Deep Isolation is that the former would have permanently disposed of the waste in vertical wellbores drilled into crystalline basement rocks below sedimentary basins (~17,000′ below the surface); whereas Deep Isolation would dispose of the waste in “retrievable” horizontal boreholes in sedimentary rocks (~5,300′ below the surface).
Conclusion
It’s nice to see the BEST folks doing something useful. It’s an interesting concept. I just tend to think that it makes more sense to permanently dispose of the waste in deep wells, drilled into crystalline basement rocks, rather than shale formations in sedimentary basins.
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Waste is next generations’ resource. Deep burial therefore destroys a valuable resource.
It’s not “destroyed. It becomes a man-made “ore body” at a known depth and location. It’s sort of geocached. If the attidudes about and economics of reprocessing change, and technology continues to improve, future mining companies might be able to re-drill the wells and recover the waste containers.
Yucca mountain was a perfectly good answer as to storing the used materials. Recycling first is even better. Eventually we will be wanting this so-called waste… Trying to store it for hundreds of thousands of years is just ridiculous. No one can foretell the future, not even climate scientists.
Why this country cannot execute reasonable plans is beyond me… You would think as much as we spend on education our population would be at least slightly educated – instead they are a superstitious lot worshiping at the foot of Chicken Little.
Yucca Mountain was ideal.
In addition to not being a lawyer I am also not a nuclear engineer. But having observed the Yucca Mountain debacle it is clear that the political barriers to waste storage must be solved before we debate the merits of the available technical solutions. We have a technically viable solution today that is not being used because of political forces. What makes anyone think that will change if you propose a new method? Sure, they will gladly accept the funding and jobs to build something new, but then scuttle it once we try to use it.
IMHO the best solution to nuclear waste is to produce less of it, which means breeder reactors. That doesn’t help the US currently because all our commercial reactors are light water models that were designed to produce plutonium for the military. However Canada has CANDU (heavy water) reactors which I have read can be fueled with waste from conventional reactors. So if we’re not going to build more nuclear weapons, my solution would be to reprocess the fuel and send whatever we can’t use to Canada to be burned up in their reactors.
What you have is less than 10% of the current volume of waste without all the really nasty long-lived stuff. This make the disposal and storage problem at least an order of magnitude easier, cheaper and safer.
Worried about moving plutonium around? Since the 1950’s up until relatively recently we’ve had plutonium flying over our heads all around the world in B-52s 24 hours a day seven days a week and 365.2425 days a year. As I recall there were two B-52 crashes carrying nuclear bombs and they were all recovered. The B-52s will remain in service until 2050 or so and since that was their job for over 50 years, we could just use them to fly the waste to Canada or anyplace else in the world that can burn it up. It would be like old times.
“it is clear that the political barriers to waste storage must be solved before we debate the merits of the available technical solutions.”
Well Alan, since we cannot even overcome the political barriers of how to count votes I think there will never be a real debate about anything in science. Yes,I have finally thrown in the towel. Let the voters reap what they sow. I am old enough now to just go out into the Nevada desert and wait for the aliens to come and take me away.
I thought they stood down the nuclear B-52’s shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed.
I also thought the B-52’s were on hot standby. Ready to take off in a minute or two once an alert was sounded.
My information comes from retired USAF General Philip Breedlove, former SACEUR from a talk he gave here on Nov 5th. He said the service life of the B-52 program had recently been extended into 2050. Considering the first B-52s entered service in 1955 it’s quite remarkable. Of course I doubt any of those original airframes are still flying; we were rolling out the “H” model over 60 years ago.
Ah, here we go:
A fleetwide modernization of the B-52s was announced in 2013. The upgraded H models can carry twenty 2,000-lb JDAMs. I should think a very modest flight schedule should be sufficient to transport all our spent fuel to Canada for safe fissioning in their reactors.
Guys: A lot of this was covered in a book written in 1994 entitled: “Whose backyard, whose risk : fear and fairness in toxic and nuclear waste siting” by Michael Gerrard. Available on Amazon (and possibly Barnes&Noble). Well worth reading.
Cheapest way to get rid of nuclear waste – place it in tectonic subduction zones.
Radioactive material consists of the “biggest” = heaviest molecules that exist: thei’re RADIOACTIVE!
So from subduction zones this materials sinks directly to the earth core. Problem solved.
Tritium is radioactive.
corrected molecules –> atoms:
Cheapest way to get rid of nuclear waste – place it in tectonic subduction zones.
Radioactive material consists of the “biggest” = heaviest atoms that exist: thei’re RADIOACTIVE!
So from subduction zones this materials sinks directly to the earth core. Problem solved.
__________________________________________________
https://www.google.at/search?q=periodic+table+elements+list&oq=periodic+table+elements&aqs=chrome.
Adding extra radioactivity increases the temperature of the core, which causes an increase in vulcanism.
Yes, Mark:”Adding extra radioactivity increases the temperature of the core, which causes an increase in vulcanism.”
OTOH in subducting tetonic plates there IS already radioactive materials – we digged our radioactive material from that very plate.
Sort of recycling.
So what is the problem again?
Now that I retired from the nuclear industry I am having more frequent senior moments. It is really embarrassing to find yourself stand in front of the frig with a cold beer mug trying to remember why you went to the frig.
These days I worry about motor homes safety. By my thing is something is a problem then you will find evidence of the problem. While there are lots of discussions on the topic in the RV forums, when I check the stats less then 10 people die in a motor home as a result of accident.
Spent nuclear fuel is like watching paint dry. When people talk about dying of boredom, I think it is just an expression.
The immediate problem, if there is one, is that there are many ways to properly manage spent nuclear fuel. There are many processes in the top ten. All are suitable by any standard applied with mature knowledge of physics and chemistry.
The pity is that having isolated a top ten, there is never-ending argument about which is the better of that ten, when any one would do.
The first cut should ask “do we want to isolate this material for the hundreds of years until redioactivity decays to background uranium mine levels, or do we want to be able to recover it because it is valuable?”
After you make that decision, the rest is plain sailing.
I have never in my (long) life seen so much prevarication, so much delay of the onset of the evil hour. It is patently ridiculous to argue this method or that.
And yes, I have a long history of involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle, at a level able to influence national policies, so you can be assured that I am not blowing smoke.
For goodness sake, choose a method then deploy it. The risk of a wrong choice is negligible. Geoff.
The more economical nuclear waste (fuel) disposal is to build a breeder reactor. This 600-MW breeder reactor (BN-600) in Russia has been operating since 1980.
Norway has a Plutonium/Mox reactor called THOR. It uses thorium pellets and plutonium or other types of nuclear waste pellets to run a conventional light water reactor. It converts all the waste into not harmless but much less hazardous and shorter half life waste. All while working better than a conventional uranium rod.
Quite right. Blows the “bury it” meme out of the water. Time to get out of nursery-school mentality & become intelligent adults concerning this issue.
Steve Mosher, Director for Asia/Pacific A scientist at Berkeley Earth
Remind me again, what’s his degree in, because as I recall it wasn’t in any field of science hence calling his a scientist is fake news.
They’re really loose with the definition of “scientist” anymore. Maybe Mosher stayed at a Holiday Inn?
A scientist is anyone who does science. A degree isn’t necessary.
A scientist is anyone who does science.
well there you have it, Mosh is no scientist.
And a brain surgeon is anyone who does brain surgery?
Geoff
A scientist is anyone who does science
so every kid who did their assigned experiment in high school science class is a scientist (after all they were doing science). Somehow I always thought the bar for being a scientist was higher than that. But considering Mikey Mann, perhaps it isn’t.
Not to defend Mosher, but there are plenty of “real” scientists that post just as stupid stuff as non-scientists. Not so sure a degree makes someone intelligent or worth listen to. If being a “scientists” determines who are the ones qualified to discuss a topic that affects everyone then we are all screwed.
No one is saying a degree is needed to make someone intelligent or worth listening to (that’s certainly not what I was implying). But if someone is going to be referred to as a “scientist” they best have the bona fides to back that up.
The project Yucca Mountain was a boondoogle to Nevada. They spent billions, and continue to spend money on it and not use it. Frankly, the bore hole idea is cool but a complete waste of time and money. The fuel can be reprocessed. Secondly, it guards itself pretty well. Radiation decreases at 1/distance^2. We need to get back to reprocessing and using the spent fuel. A nuclear reactor only uses about 10% of the fuel it is loaded with. At that point the pressure in the fuel is too high and the stainless steal growth or aluminum distortion is too great and the heat transfer in the flow channels is diminished. So lots of fuel remains. That is a lot of “carbon free” fuel being buried and not utilized.
Steve
Congratulations on this excellent effort to bring some sense into nuclear long term disposal!
The failure to solve this problem for approaching a century is becoming an embarrassment to the human race.
Since in 3 of the examples given, the ground temp is over 100C, and the heat given off by the stored waste would raise it further, what happens if water leaks into the well?
OK casing failures are rare etc. according to the other thread on fracking “Ground water can be contaminated if a well’s steel casing and cement fails or fluids are spilled on the surface, but these problems are uncommon, local and can be fixed” and “The rate of mechanical failures in hydraulically fractured wells in the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin of Colorado, has been estimated at 0.06% to 0.15% and none were due to the fracking process itself (Sherwood, et al. 2016)”
How long can the steel/cement casing/steel canisters etc. be guaranteed for, and what kind of fail-safe prevents a radioactive geyser in x 10’s of yrs?
David –good summary of the horizontal drilling idea.
Cheaper than mining storage space at depth.
But in geological time risky.
For decades I’ve suggested just glassing the stuff, then put it into used shipping containers and wrap that with lead.
Drop it into the Mid-Atlantic rift.
Bye-Bye
Gone
That would work, only not a forming tectonic boundary like the mid-Atlantic; rather a subduction zone like the west Pacific at or near the Marianas trench. Then it goes down into the magma and it’s real gone. This has been also proposed already for decades. But stopped by dog-in-the-manger activist paralysis.
The nuclear impasse is an embarrassment to the human race and caused by hard-wired politics driven stupidity. Humanity is responding to this by producing more autists, especially high functioning autists (HFAs), where enhanced cerebral development occurs at the expense of complex, devious and counterproductive social behaviours. Some problems will only be solved by HFAs, byzantines just get hopelessly bogged down in useless politics.
Wow. The level of utter stupidity coming out of Berkeley is even worse than usual. No, don’t reprocess valuable nuclear material & extract further energy out of it while reducing its radioactivity/half-life enormously, bury it way down into the ground?!? Jeesh. It’s not just plain stupid from an energy standpoint, it smacks of paranoia and hysterics.
There’s still a problem. Where would we drill these boreholes?
Remember that there is always the “NIMBY syndrome”.
NIMBY’ism is a universal constant.
Guys: A lot of this was discussed in a book by Michael Gerrard entitled: “Whose Backyard, Whose Risk: Fear and Fairness in Toxic and Nuclear Waste Siting” published in 1994. Available on Amazon or Barnes&Noble.
Perhaps you should change your password to something other than “M1ke1sAw3s0m3″… -mod]
Nothing like that has ever been my password.
I’m in Queensland, Australia but not in Brisbane. I’ve been posting here for what must be close to 10 years and this form of identity theft has happened before here but nowhere else.
If you look back at my posts over the years you’ll see that the idiot worried about the Hanford waste is not my style. I’m a big fan of nuclear energy, re-processing and waste storage (and Project Orion). Australia has a nice place north of Woomera that is already contaminated by Plutonium from British nuclear tests in the 1950s.
My website is here: http://www.borgeltinstruments.com
We make glider instruments and sub assemblies for Precision Agriculture. I’m a “used to be” forecaster with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (a long time ago).
“[Ok, so the Brisbane Mike is the real one? Or is the Osaka Mike the real one? Perhaps the real Mike is from Quita Ecuador? Though one wonders how you went from Ecuador to Japan in 3 hours (which is what the IP Addresses and comment timestamps show.)”
Sounds like the imposter is faking IP addresses as well as identity.
Dark HelmetMod:1-2-3-4-5? That’s the stupidest combination I’ve ever heard of in my life! That’s the kinda thing an idiot would have
on his luggageas a password!President SkroobMike Borgelt:1, 2, 3, 4, 5? That’s amazing! I’ve got the same
combination on my luggagepassword!with apologies, just what came to mind reading your post 🙂
Though to be fair, posting here doesn’t require a password anyone can type in any name when making a post.
Sounds like the imposter is faking IP addresses as well as identity
They’re probably using a VPN to hide their own IP address.