This Father-Daughter Team Says It Has a Cheaper, Safer Way to Bury Nuclear Waste

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.”