Then, using a tool called a “tractor” invented by the industry to reach horizontally into mile-deep oil reservoirs, they pushed it 120 metres farther away from the borehole through the rock.įive hours later, the crew used the tractor to relocate and collect the canister, attach it to the cable and pull it back to the surface – to the cheers of the workers.
The father-daughter team had invited 40 nuclear scientists, US Department of Energy officials, oil and gas professionals, and environmentalists to witness the first attempt to test whether the latest oil-fracking technology could be used to permanently dispose of the most dangerous nuclear waste.Īt 11.30am, the crew of oil workers used a wire cable to lower an 80cm-long, 20cm-wide, 64kg canister - filled with steel rather than radioactive waste - down a previously drilled borehole. This was a nerve-racking day for Liz Muller, cofounder of California startup technology company Deep Isolation and her father, Richard Muller, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and now chief technology officer at Deep Isolation. Skip forward to Cameron, Texas, on 16 January 2019. The new sarcophagus will last about 100 years – after which it will deteriorate and future generations will have to decide how to dismantle and store it permanently.Ī view of the new shelter installed over the the exploded reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plan. In July 2019, 33 years after the explosion, 200 metric tonnes of uranium, plutonium, liquid fuel and irradiated dust was finally encased below an enormous €1.5bn (£1.35bn) steel and concrete structure taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Everything for miles around, from the mushrooms in the woods to the trucks left in the parking lots to the toys in the nursery and the hospital beds, was radioactive to some degree.Įven though a dosimeter showed that after being washed down, the little flag was barely more radioactive than normal background levels found in nature, it should have been packaged up and landfilled as low-level nuclear waste.īy contrast, Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 site will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Less than two miles away, the stricken, crumbling Reactor 4 was one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
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