This nuclear startup and Halliburton repurposed oil-drilling tech in a bid to solve America’s radioactive waste problem
Fortune · C · trust 45/100
If you drive to the middle of nowhere in central Texas near Cameron—population 5,300—and down a gravel road, you’ll come upon a security gate with a sign stating, “Watch out for the cows.” The warning is no hyperbole, as cattle block the road, delaying the eventual sight of a massive oil-drilling rig.
A large, bearded man in red Halliburton coveralls and helmet says to beware of snakes and scorpions. “Not trying to scare you; that’s just part of the orientation.”
Welcome to the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center. The site is home to a partnership between the nuclear waste startup Deep Isolation Nuclear, the oilfield services leader Halliburton, known for its drilling and fracking expertise, and others.
The goal is to solve the nation’s nuclear waste disposal problems just in time to power the construction gold rush of AI data centers with a renaissance of next-generation nuclear energy . The partners aim to use modern, directional oil-drilling techniques to safely bury radioactive waste in perpetuity—about 2 miles underground—in specially designed, 5,000-pound canisters.
“To make sure we have a good path for new nuclear, we need to make sure we take care of the waste,” said Deep Isolation CEO Rod Baltzer. “We can go twice as deep as a typical [mined nuclear waste] repository, and then follow a formation that’s been out of touch with the surface for a million years.”
To date, more than 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel—and rising—sit in temporary storage across about 80 sites in over 30 states, with no permanent homes at the ready.
A decadeslong effort to develop a controversial, nationwide waste repository in the Nevada desert at Yucca Mountain has largely failed, and the federal government is still trying to figure out how to proceed. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in July just named five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—as finalists for “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” to tackle nuclear fuel recycling and waste. Even if recycling technology proves to be the answer, there will still be waste left over. Deep Isolation believes it has the solution: drilling boreholes near nuclear plants—or anywhere else—for safe disposal. “You can put it where the waste is generated,” Baltzer said.
Combining oil and nuclear waste techniques was considered as long as 40 years ago, but the technology and economics weren’t feasible then. Only now is the topic being revisited, especially as the energy sector has perfected drilling much longer wells, including horizontally, to unlock more crude oil from geological rock formations. For Deep Isolation, the buried nuclear waste canisters can even be retrieved in case of emergency.
No one in the nuclear industry really understood the massive technological advancements made in oil drilling within the last 10 to 20 years, Baltzer told Fortune . “Everybody in oil and gas was like, ‘We do this every day,’” he said. “And everybody in nuclear went, ‘Holy cow, I did not know you could do this and retrieve it. That’s amazing.’ We realized there was this disconnect—they just weren’t talking to each other.”
Time is now of the essence as the AI race escalates, said Jesse Sloane, Deep Isolation executive vice president of engineering. After all, the Trump administration has committed to a fourfold increase in nuclear power by 2050.
“You can’t do that without answering the question of, ‘Well, what do you do with the waste?’” Sloane said.
Early next year, Halliburton will drill the first test well—using an extra-large drill bit—to delve thousands of feet underground vertically and horizontally. And then demonstrate that a crane can reach back in and retrieve each canister one at a time.
“The nuclear community really wants to see us physically do something at scale and at depth here before they can really get behind it and understand how simple it really is,” said Andy Griffith, executive director of the demonstration center and former deputy assistant secretary of nuclear energy at the DOE.
“Even today, people are saying, ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s so risky. What if it gets stuck? What if the seal doesn’t work?’” Griffith continued. “And the oil and gas industry people are like, ‘This is not a big deal.’ But for people that are unfamiliar, they want to see it done. And that’s what we’re doing here. And they’ll be more open to it, I think.”
The shale oil boom was revolutionized in part by drilling vertically and then horizontally to dig deeper into the subsurface and crack open more shale rock to release the liquids inside. In this case, the same techniques will be used—except to carry the nuclear waste canister farther away from the surface and wellhead.
A common misconception, including within the oil business itself, is that vertical-then-horizontal drilling means making an “L” shape. In reality, the well may be drilled nearly 1 mile deep, and then curved by turning roughly 4 degrees every 100 feet. “It’s a very gradual bend,” Griffith said. “If you’re looking down a 4-degree-per-100-foot bend, you can’t tell it’s bent in any given section because it’s so gradual.”
Of course, while the oil industry now routinely drills 4-mile-long horizontal wells, replicating the feat for nuclear waste is no simple task—even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of a “big deal.”
A well is typically drilled about 8 inches wide closer to the bottom, where the oil is sourced. The nuclear waste well will require drilling it about 22 inches wide instead, nearly triple the size. That means using a larger drill bit than normal, then coming back into the well with a “hole opener”—the actual, self-explanatory name for the tool—to expand the width.
This creates a more “interesting” and “fun” proposition, said Jason Foreman, Halliburton’s North America region manager.
“We drill wells all around the world in various combinations of challenges, and we do it every day,” Foreman told Fortune . “This project pulls them all together, which makes it…
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