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Deep Isolation says the problem with nuclear waste disposal is we’re not going far enough

- Ashlee Vance

A case study in the annals of political paralysis has been Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a would-be repository for the country’s nuclear waste that’s never quite come to serve that purpose. The debate over whether to store spent nuclear fuel inside Yucca has entered its fourth decade, and rumblings from the White House and Congress suggest lots more ineffectual arguing ahead. That is, unless the Mullers get their way.

Richard and Elizabeth Muller have come up with one of the more unusual father-daughter businesses in recent memory. On March 20 they announced a startup called Deep Isolation that aims to store nuclear waste much more safely and cheaply than existing methods. The key to the technology, according to the Mullers, is to take advantage of fracking techniques to place nuclear waste in 2-mile-long tunnels, much deeper than they’ve been before—a mile below the Earth’s surface, where they’ll be surrounded by shale. “We’re using a technique that’s been made cheap over the last 20 years,” says Richard, a famed physicist and climate change expert. “We could begin putting this waste underground right away.”

The Mullers have four generations living in a four-story house with wood-shingle siding located partway up a small hill in Berkeley, Calif. It’s the same house where Elizabeth grew up; Richard has been there for 51 years. In a downstairs study filled with books, including many copies of Richard’s physics best-sellers, the Mullers lay out their plan for solving one of America’s great technological and political riddles with a homespun charm that feels less reassuring than it should. These folks seem to be making plain-spoken sense, but they don’t exactly come off as hard-charging industrialists well-equipped to surmount the political roadblocks in their path.